It’s been a while. Here’s the honest accounting.

I’ve spent most of the past eight months deep in edits on Buckskin Rides Again, my motorcycle travel memoir. The manuscript is in good shape and I’ll have more to report on timing soon. If you’re not already subscribed to my Substack, Narrative Mileage, that’s where the serialized chapters and craft essays live.

On the family front: I’ve been to Arizona twice since my last update, both times to visit my parents, and my brother and his family. Here are some snapshots from a little sojourn we took in southeastern Arizona’s mining country in November.

Here are some shots from our trip to the White Mountains and Sedona in April. I’ve said it before: desert people love a desert vacation.

By the time I left Arizona in May, Mom and Dad finally agreed to move to a Life Care community, which any of you navigating that conversation with aging parents will recognize as a small miracle. It’s harder to get in than people realize—timing and health matter more than most families know until it’s too late. I wrote about the process of making that choice—and sheltering a cockroach—in a recent newsletter.

Meanwhile, my next book project—Along the Ohio—is taking shape. It’s the working title for my travel-history exploration of the Ohio River, America’s longest and only tangible slavery border. After working on it later this month at the Appalachian Writers Workshop, I’ll continue researching, and visiting river towns, learning how each community tells (and sometimes hides) its own history.

The project is under contract with the University of Illinois Press and will be published as part of their 3 Field Books imprint. If know a story worth telling from the Ohio River region, please let me know.