Call Me Ishmael If You Want

I don't care what you call me. Call me Ishmael if you want.

I live alone in a trailer and write large novels about civilization, imagination, and the power of an ancient redwood tree. That's a strange sentence to write about yourself, but that's where I am in life.

I did not come to fiction through literary culture, if by literary culture we mean MFA programs, professorships, or institutional backing. I came to it through economics, journalism, teaching, philosophy, years of reading, and a lifelong inability to accept the world as given. I suppose my personal motto would be something like: Veni. Vidi. Restiti. I came. I watched. I resisted. I know that sounds pompous. But I think it's true.

When I became an economist, it seemed rational. It seemed to offer explanatory power. But even while studying systems, I could never fully step inside them. Something in me always remained outside, watching. Doubting. Resisting. The same thing happened when I taught, when I worked in journalism, when I moved through institutions built on performance and obedience. I saw how easily human beings learn to trade their own imagination and moral instincts for approval and security.

I grew up unusually sensitive to domination. To the quiet ways institutions classify people, diminish them, and decide who matters and who does not. I never adapted to those systems very well. Instead, I kept searching for something older. I found some of it in nature. In silence. In dogs. In redwood trees older than civilization itself. In the feeling that reality still existed somewhere underneath noise.

Maybe it's like this, if you know my novel, The Narcissism of the Sacred: I was Galen before I invented Galen. Or if you know FERADIM, I was Julian Weissman before Julian needed me to give him life.

I remember standing in front of classrooms where students were already learning to treat education as performance. I remember watching universities increasingly reorganize themselves around evaluation, branding, and customer satisfaction while something quieter and more human slowly drained out of the room.

I remember covering nuclear power safety and the banking industry as a reporter and feeling, over and over, how institutions normalize danger, consolidate power, and teach people to accept realities that quietly deform them. Everywhere I looked, systems seemed to reward obedience, standardization, and emotional conformity while slowly weakening imagination and independent thought.

***

I have no idea where those instincts came from exactly. My parents were unremarkable in most ways. We moved constantly when I was growing up because of my father's work as an aerospace engineer. The Deep South. The West Coast. New schools every few years. New social systems. New expectations. New ways of learning where you fit and where you didn't. Maybe some people learn adaptability from that. I mostly learned how to stand slightly outside whatever system I had entered and watch it.

Some kids grow up wanting to be rich. I grew up wanting to understand. Wanting to become larger than whatever intrinsic abilities I was born with. Sports, school, authority, performance, conformity, masculinity, status. I was surrounded by the ordinary systems that teach people how to obey and belong. Nothing unusual. Just normal American life. But for whatever reason, something in me kept resisting it. A coach told me to run faster, so I ran slower, on purpose. I could never fully surrender myself to the roles I was supposed to play or the values I was supposed to inherit. The refusal instinct became a through line throughout my life long before I had language for it.

If I hadn't grown up to be a writer, I'd have been a revolutionary.

I was trained originally in mainstream economics, in free market theory, in the language and assumptions of systems that claimed to explain human behavior rationally and objectively. At first I found that world compelling. Economics seemed to offer explanatory power. But the more deeply I entered it, the more I began to doubt. And doubt led to reading outside of it. Marx. Habermas. The Frankfurt School. Philosophy. Literature. Kafka. Camus. Anything I could get my hands on that dissected the systems I was being trained to accept.

It didn't take me long to realize I had been indoctrinated. The tools themselves were useful. Statistics. Analysis. Ways of thinking about systems. I could handle all of that. What bothered me was the way the whole thing was wrapped in the elegance of the market and presented as objective truth instead of ideology. At a certain point I started thinking: wait a minute. Why didn't anybody teach me Marx? Why wasn't I being taught competing ways of understanding power, class, and human behavior? Why was one worldview presented as reality itself while everything outside it barely existed?

At the same time, I had always been a writer in one form or another. I started writing stories when I was young and never really stopped. Through grade school, college, graduate school, jobs, moves, all of it, writing remained the constant thread underneath everything else. I went to workshops, studied literature and writing on my own, read obsessively, and filled notebooks and hard drives with stories I never even attempted to publish. Stories like Bella Figuera, The Namer, Middle People. The Accidental God.

I had to write. When one feels voiceless in other parts of life, one often becomes a writer. But I never saw it as something a person like me could realistically make a life from. Given the circumstances of my life, nonfiction seemed more practical, more grounded in the world I actually inhabited. So I wrote books like Generation X Goes to College, Standardized Minds, and Tearing Down the Gates, all of them circling the same underlying concerns about education, power, class, conformity, and the systems that shape human beings long before they understand what is happening to them.

The turning point for me came slowly through my work on education and class. While writing books like Tearing Down the Gates and Standardized Minds, I began realizing that knowledge itself was no longer the central issue. We live in a culture obsessed with testing, accountability, credentialing, classification, and performance, but underneath all of it was a deeper and far more disturbing reality.

Knowledge is not power, I realized in Generation X Goes to College. Imagination is power. That idea proved to be a turning point for me.

Some people are raised to imagine, question, explore, create, and move confidently through the world as human beings whose inner lives matter. Others are trained for obedience, economic survival, performance, and adaptation to systems they did not create and are never encouraged to question. The more I wrote about education, class, and institutional power, the more I began to understand that the deepest forms of inequality are spiritual and imaginative. Entire groups of people slowly lose the ability to imagine lives outside the systems handed to them.

That realization changed everything for me. It was no longer enough to analyze systems intellectually. I wanted to understand what happens to the human soul when imagination itself begins to disappear. That is what finally led me toward the writing of novels.

I never set out consciously to build a connected body of work. I wrote the way I have always written, from instinct, from obsession, from questions that would not leave me alone. Certain ideas stayed with me for years, sometimes decades, before I understood why they mattered so much to me.

The first major expression of that became FERADIM. The seed of it went all the way back to high school, when a teacher handed me a book called The Passover Plot and asked me to write an essay about it. Something about that book stayed with me for decades. The question was not whether its argument was right. The question was larger and stranger: how does an origin story become sacred? How does power take a fragile human event, shape it, protect it, repeat it, and turn it into truth?

That was the beginning of FERADIM, which I didn't imagine as a novel until decades later. The novel imagines an ancient massacre buried beneath the foundations of Western civilization and asks what happens when modern scholars uncover evidence that the sacred story sustaining two thousand years of history may have originated in violence, suppression, and the human need to sanctify power. The deeper subject of the novel is not religion itself, but the psychological pattern that repeats across civilization: the need to belong to power, to feel protected and loved by systems that repeatedly betray the very human beings who surrender themselves to them.

The Narcissism of the Sacred continued that inquiry at a more intimate level. It is a novel about the fear of fearlessness: what happens when a fearless voice enters a system built on fear. Galen’s manuscript forces Isabel to see the bargain she has lived by, and how imagination is crushed when truth becomes too dangerous to say aloud.

That eventually led me to 001-054. By that point, the question was no longer simply what power suppresses, but what happens when human beings gradually lose the ability to imagine anything outside the systems already shaping them. The novel grew out of the unsettling realization that the cultural panic surrounding artificial intelligence may partly conceal something even more disturbing: long before machines began imitating human imagination, modern civilization was already teaching people to distrust, standardize, monetize, and surrender their own.

***

But beneath all of these novels is something deeper than politics, institutions, or power. The deeper struggle in my work is spiritual. I have always felt that human beings are reaching for something larger, older, more truthful than the systems we create around ourselves, and that much of modern life is organized around severing us from that inheritance while offering us symbolic substitutes in its place.

That is why nature returns again and again throughout my work. As something untouched by human narcissism. In FERADIM, the lost testimony of the massacre at the center of the novel survives because a young boy carries the scroll north on horseback and buries it beneath an ancient California redwood tree, beyond the reach of institutions and empires. In The Narcissism of the Sacred, Galen tells his students that if they want to recover their imagination, they should go stand in front of a redwood tree, because something in them still recognizes a reality older than systems, older than power. At the end of the novel, Isabel buries Galen's manuscript beneath Yale's tallest tree for the same reason. Some truths belong outside the reach of power.

The same spiritual instinct appears again at the end of 001-054. After Whitman rejects the systems that tried to capture and define him, he travels west to the Oregon coast. The only audience left for the imagination is a city of ancient rocks rising from the ocean, listening silently the way they have listened for thousands of years, before human beings arrived, and will continue listening long after we are gone.

I suppose all three novels are asking the same question in different forms: what remains of the human soul when the systems surrounding us become incapable of distinguishing reality from performance or imagination from imitation. My work keeps returning to the possibility that something essential in us still survives outside those systems, waiting to be remembered.

My name is Peter. A complete unknown. It could be Carson or Galen or Isabel or Julian, or any number of my characters who have tried to live and say something true. But this note is not really about me. It is about a human being growing up slowly through writing and through life, trying to understand what kind of world we have built and why so many people feel trapped inside realities they did not choose and no longer know how to question.

I think all of my work, fiction and nonfiction alike, has been driven by the hope that human beings might someday grow beyond systems rooted in domination and fear. The need to belong to power. Maybe that hope is naïve. Maybe it is impossible. I do not know. I only know that the imagination remains one of the few places where human beings can still encounter something freer and more truthful than what the systems they've created permit them to be.

In the end, becoming a novelist was not a career decision for me. It was an act of growing up. It became the only form true enough to hold everything I had spent my life trying to understand.

Becoming a novelist is the most grown-up thing I could ever imagine doing.