Journal of a Recalcitrant

Journal of a Recalcitrant is a place for the thoughts that don’t quite fit anywhere else. Some of them will be about writing and fiction. Others will wander into religion, history, politics, philosophy, books I’m reading, or whatever subject has managed to occupy too much of my attention that week. There probably won’t be much consistency beyond the person doing the writing.

I chose recalcitrant deliberately. I’ve never been particularly good at accepting an answer simply because it’s the answer I was given. That tendency has occasionally been useful and occasionally made my life considerably more complicated. Either way, questioning inherited assumptions—my own included—has become a fairly permanent part of how I understand the world.

This isn’t meant to be a collection of declarations from someone who has everything figured out. Quite the opposite. I’m interested in the process of changing my mind, discovering where I was wrong, revisiting ideas I thought I had abandoned, and occasionally becoming more convinced of something after trying very hard not to be. If there’s a unifying idea here, it’s probably that uncertainty is more interesting than certainty pretending to be wisdom.

Mostly, this is a journal in the oldest sense of the word: a record of what I’m thinking about while I’m thinking about it. Some entries may eventually become essays. Some may influence a novel. Others may exist simply because I wanted somewhere to put the thought before it disappeared. Consider this the margin beside the fiction—the place where I get to argue with books, ideas, institutions, myself, and, every now and then, anyone unfortunate enough to be reading along.