Introducing a new series: Winter is Coming

Taking a look back at three-ish years of a lifestyle experiment in Montana

If you’ve been reading this newsletter (or following me on Instagram) for more than a minute, you’ll already know at least the outline of this story: from 2017 - 2021, my husband and I lived in Montana, first in our Airstream on a friend’s property, and later while building an off-grid homestead on the side of a mountain.

Spoiler alert: here’s the way it all ended.

At the time, despite being in the midst of building a business and working to embrace my identity as a writer, I didn’t really write about our experience other than brief captions on Instagram posts.

There were a few reasons for this: sure, I was busy with the whole “building a business” (and “building a home”) thing, but also, I was hesitant to put too much out on the internet about what we were doing, where we were doing it, and why. We’d never been interested in seeking publicity for what was a deeply personal choice (we turned down interest from HGTV and at least one reality TV show, because not interested in that circus, thanks.) We’d moved to a fairly remote corner of a fairly unpopulated region in part because we sought solitude. And living in a small community, in which we were both heavily involved, we wanted to keep a bit of a boundary between our public and private lives. Anyone who has lived in a small town will understand some of these hesitations, yet I had so many friends and acquaintances near and far ask, all throughout the process: are you going to write about it?

I always said maybe, someday.

Someday is finally here.

So now, a few years later, our off-grid home’s been sold, we’ve completed an entire other chapter of life in ski heaven, Colorado, we’ve embarked on a new journey around the world, and we’re starting to discuss what might come next. I’m feeling the draw of nostalgia and memory as well as the call of future possibility, all resulting in the urge to write more and capture the lessons of these formative few years. So, I’m excited to finally share more of the stories from that decidedly eventful chapter that had such a big impact on the future course of our lives.

I’m calling the series “Winter is Coming” for two reasons: because we’re both big nerds, of course, but more importantly, because living in this part of the world and intentionally disconnecting from the easy button of standard infrastructural systems of power, water, and comfort, winter is always there in the back of your mind. Whether it’s ensuring you have enough firewood to keep warm, having the right equipment to navigate the roads, or any of the other everyday steps needed, almost every decision we made and action we took was informed by the very real truth: winter was in fact coming.

To look back at a massive project and experiment spanning two locations and three(ish) years, I’ve chosen to organize this series around the five elements of Chinese Medicine (Water, Fire, Metal, Wood, and Earth), creatively adapted to suit my purposes, and because I’m a child of the 1980’s, we’ve also gotta have heart.¹ As of now, I have 18 posts planned in this series, and I aim to publish new entries approximately twice a month.

The first entry is coming tomorrow. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed looking back.

---

A quick note: the first entry in this series, tomorrow’s post, will be free to all of my subscribers. Subsequent posts will be for paid supporters: if you’d like to support this writing project, I’d encourage you to consider the annual subscription, which offers you an up-front savings as I anticipate these posts will be spread across 9-10 months over the coming year.

I’ll continue to share my periodic travel reports and reflections from the road with all subscribers, both free & paid, and these public posts will continue to be paywalled one week after date of publication. (If you’re curious about why I take this approach to my work, you can read more here. A recent post from internet-friend & fellow writer Nicole Antoinette also puts it well: “That’s why paywalling…has been such a supportive choice for me…it lets me write what I want to write in a way that feels expansive and fun — with the added benefit of helping to … creat[e] the financial reciprocity I need as a working writer to pay my bills.”)

Thanks for being here, and following along as I share stories from my journey near & far.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Planet_and_the_Planeteers