The Things that Matter

Welcome to What Remains

I suppose one of the side effects of getting older is looking back on the obsessions and activities that shaped your younger years and seeing them in a new light. I’m probably not the first person to re-evaluate their life in an attempt to figure out what it all means. I’m also not the first person to decide that there are ideals, values, and stories that are worth preserving, but that’s where I find myself on this creative journey.

To that end, I began writing a novel about an antique store named What Remains. The store is located in the place where I spent my childhood: Fenwick, West Virginia.

Since I’ve always been a fan of the more fantastical side of storytelling, the story features an old woman with the gift (or curse) of psychometry. That’s a fancy term that means she’s able to learn about significant moments from an item’s past by touching them.

Some of the stories she discovers are hopeful. Others are bittersweet. A few are unsettling in the way a ghost story told around a campfire might be. More uncanny rather than frightening.

The heart of this novel lies in those stories.

I’ve spent more than a year writing those stories. It’s largely why this newsletter has been relatively silent during that time. And yet I feel that this silence was ultimately a good thing. I’ve spent all of that time thinking about what this newsletter should be.

Over the past year, I’ve realized that this newsletter, Written Ward, isn’t really about technology, nostalgia, books, or even fiction. They were different ways of exploring the same idea. It’s about preservation. That’s the theme I’ve been seearching for all this time.

Writing my novel, What Remains, helped bring this idea into focus. It gave me a clearer understanding of what Written Ward is meant to be.

This newsletter is about stories that endure. It’s about the unseen, unnoticed people who create meaningful work. It’s about the objects we keep even after they’ve outlived their usefulness because they remind us who we used to be.

That’s what Written Ward is about.

Each month, we’ll step through the front door of that antique store. Many weeks we’ll join Hank Shaw in his attempts to catalog and understand the strange objects his great-aunt Bessie locked away in the cellar. He sketches them, studies them, and tries to figure out why they were hidden in the first place.

Then, we’ll follow those objects backward through time.

Along the way, I’ll share books, films, newsletters, and creators whose work deserves a wider audience. I’ll sit down with writers to talk about the stories they’re telling and why they matter.

Some months, we’ll linger with a single artifact. Other times, we’ll leave the store behind entirely and follow a longer tale to see where it leads.

If you’ve ever wondered about the people you see in old photographs, or tried to imagine what made items in a box of keepsakes special, I think you’ll feel at home here.

Welcome. The shop is open.