Hey y’all. Joshua Trent Brown here. Alan is letting me take over for today’s newsletter because today is a special day! Today is the day my book enters the world, a newborn baby, a stack of 315ish pages of fresh paper that I have loved and hated and cared for deeply and it all started from a family history book, put together by my mother’s cousin.

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A 3-inch binder with so much detail. There’s even a letter from a Union soldier/ancestor moaning that, after seeing his brother — a confederate — on the battlefield and losing him, the only thing he wished was that he had shot or captured him.

So,  I was handed this binder and I read it looking for stories.

Right there, at the front, was my story.

Really, right there, in a glossary full of minutiae, on a multiple-page list of names, everyone in the family, there’s his name at the very bottom: George.

And written beside his name is one word: unknown. 

My  cousin had contacted multiple members of the family — including those in Mississippi who surely would’ve known him or known of him — and they all had the same thing to say:

“I’ve never heard that name before.”

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Now, he was a real man who walked this earth. There are a few folks around who remember him, his flesh and blood.

But the facts are few. He grew up in Mississippi. He was of Choctaw descent; although fiction creeps in here: maybe fully, half, maybe less. He lived in North Carolina with my great-grandmother for a good portion of his life.

And then there are the questionable facts. He arrived to North Carolina by train. He was coming with the circus. I’ve been told he was “as mean as a snake.”

The rest of him is lost, or of such questionable veracity that you might as well call it fiction.

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The implications of this are, obviously, unbelievable. It doesn’t make sense. I get headaches considering it.

So I didn’t consider it. Instead, I took a three-year journey with it and out came this novel — The Walls Are Closing In On Us. It’s not about him. But it’s about him. It’s also about ghosts and violent animals and love and all sorts of things.  It’s all so complicated. 

Anyway—

I hope you’ll read my book. That’s all. Of course, I hope you’ll enjoy it too but — let’s get there when we get there.

To close us out, here’s a quote from a book. I won’t tell you what book, you can probably guess. But it’s important to me and to my book. You can probably guess that too, if you’ll give it a read. Thanks.

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”