The Next Evolution

New Mexico. Photo by L.M. Browning (Copyright 2022)

Hi Folks,

Thanks for stopping by my travelogue here on Substack. Think of this pitstop as a digital all-night diner for the road-lifers, the wayfarers, the outliers, the marginalized, the othered, the orphaned, the radically authentic, the awe-seekers …

Why Substack? Why Now?

I’ve been living on the road (and/or off the grid) since June 2022. This platform seems to offer an opportunity to circle everyone together and provide community, connection, and creative kinship. You know, all of us—the artists, the creatives, the poets, the wanderers, the homesteaders, the vagabonds, the spiritual mutts, the queers, the disowned, the awe-seekers . . . the healing generation.

Books or Short Form?

I’d planned to come out with my full-length memoir, Wild Silence, which I began a wild-ly long time ago (2012-ish). I workshopped what I considered to be the final draft during my time at Harvard in the autumn of 2019. The manuscript was around two-thirds done when I realized I wasn’t writing a memoir at all. I was writing the cosmology of my childhood—an echoing inner narrative that I had been telling myself for decades—that was about to become fiction. I eventually let the manuscript go and let the energy from the project take a new form: this travelogue.

Taking Space & Time.

I’ve decided to take a beat on books and integrate the events and realizations from recent years. This means pushing out full-length projects for a few years and exploring these short-form spaces while I allow my creative expression to evolve with the rest of me.

What I hope to create here on Substack is a digital space to explore the evolution of my voice as a poet, my eye as a photographer, and my journey as an ever-flawed individual reaching for wild awe to balance successive generational trauma.

If you would like to follow along, I invite you to Subscribe & Follow.

I will post every 10 Days (or so) for the paid subscribers and roughly once a month for everyone.

Paid Subscriptions.

Money from those folks who opt for paid subscriptions goes toward the monthly expenses I incur. (i.e.: Gas, building supplies for the off-grid farm; health care and food for Kiva (my dog); clothing; food; and other basic items. We are also saving for a Small Teardrop to solve unstable housing issues on the road.

Fellow Travelers

Drop me a postcard from the road or from your home town at:

L.M. Browning

PO Box 1601

Northampton, MA 01060

Safe Travels

—Les

Wild Silence Travelogue is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

L.M. Browning (they/them) is a two-spirited bestselling poet whose hybrid of introspective travel writing and visual art focuses on the alchemizing of trauma through active awe-seeking and a re-wilding of one’s life and self.

Over the last fifteen years, Les’ twenty-something intention to help “ensure the mainstream isn’t the only stream,” has taken shape in the form of the enduring indie platforms: Homebound Publications, Wayfarer Books,The Wayfarer Magazine & Navigator Graphics. Their own published works have received five Pushcart Prize nominations, two Foreword Review Book Awards, and the Nautilus Gold Medal for Poetry.

Recently Browning accepted a position on the State of Connecticut’s/NAMI’s Lived Experience Committee and received national certification as a Survivor of Suicide Attempt (SOSA), Group Peer Facilitator through the Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services Foundation in Los Angeles. They are a graduate of the University of London and Harvard University. 

Les and their coydog, Kiva, divide their time between New Mexico and Wayfarer Farm in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts.