Entire Sagebrush City collection

The Sagebrush City collectionL Entire Sagebrush City series (10 ebooks)

These stories are true.

The names have been changed. The details have been reworked. The people remain unmistakably themselves.

For years, a small human-services company in Sagebrush City tried to help people whose lives rarely fit inside the boxes provided for them.

The clients were known as the Finks.

The employees were the Henches.

Neither term was official.

Very little that mattered was.

The Finks arrived with benefit notices, housing disasters, street debts, medical emergencies, family wars, improbable business plans and questions no professional training had anticipated. One wanted the office to settle a forty-dollar dispute involving several different categories of money. Another robbed a restaurant of exactly one cherry
pie. Darryl asked six employees for the same extra bus pass and received six independently invented lies.

Korey treated bus schedules as prophecy, nutrition as theology and public-access television as an opportunity nobody had been wise enough to deny him.

Tallulah moved through Sagebrush City with a street name, a government name, a talent for identifying the truth sideways and enough chaos to alter the working conditions of everyone nearby.

Around them were caseworkers, supervisors, landlords, judges, police officers, benefits departments, hospitals and government systems capable of transforming hunger into “Nutritional Access Optimization” without once mentioning food.

The work could be dangerous.

It could be ridiculous.

Frequently, it was both before lunch.

Across ten books, these memoirs follow the Finks and Henches through the daily life of Sagebrush City, and follow the author through the people, places, music, family memories and losses that remained after the office closed.

Some stories are about the things people did to survive.

Some are about the systems that made survival unnecessarily complicated.

Some are about a song, a funeral, an earthquake, an office snack bowl or a dead friend who still occupies space in the structure of the world.

They are funny because the people were funny.

They are painful because the people were real.

And beneath the bad decisions, bureaucratic language, street logic and professional improvisation is the part no form ever managed to capture: the human part.