Fast Camel Press · A Memoir
Chasing Chickens: Through the Clucking Chaos
Loose in the yard in
Coming Soon
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Days
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Hours
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Minutes
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Seconds
Fast Camel Press · A Memoir
Loose in the yard in
Coming Soon
Two Dates, Twenty-Seven Days Apart
One date is the anniversary of the day the drinking stopped. The other is five years to the day from walking out of Teen Challenge with a diploma and no idea what came next. The book lands on the second one. On purpose.
Milestone
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Days
Five Years Sober
October 1, 2026
Sobriety date: 10/1/2021. Five years of showing up on days that did not feel like showing up.
Launch Day
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Days
The Book Hatches
October 28, 2026
Graduation day was 10/28/2021. Same calendar square, five years on, with a book in hand instead of a diploma.
Why Chickens
From the manuscript · "The First Chicken"
I was four, maybe five, when I first saw Aunt Gwen chase a chicken. It wasn't a wild frenzy — it was choreography. Barefoot in the yard, apron snapping, one hand on her hip, the other poised like God's own hook. She caught it, cracked it, cleaned it, cooked it.
That chicken didn't stand a chance. Neither did I. Ask me what she actually did all day and I couldn't tell you — I was four. I only knew she was amazing. That was the whole finding: filed by a very small girl, with total confidence and no evidence.
I didn't know what I was witnessing, not fully. But somewhere in the small-boned wonder of my brain, I decided: I want to be her.
And now, all these years later, sewing sleeves between spreadsheets and singing hymns with a full mouth of to-dos, I suddenly see it — I am Aunt Gwen.
No wonder I've been chasing chickens all this time. I just didn't know they were holy.
The Book
This is a memoir about a life that got away from her — a yard full of loose birds, every one of them squawking for attention, every one of them somehow hers.
It is not a recovery manual. It is not a redemption pamphlet with a soft-focus cover. It's the actual record: the childhood that formed her, the crash that split her timeline in half, the decades of thriving in public while unraveling in private, and the 366 days that put her back together in an order nobody would have chosen.
It is very funny in the places where funny is the only honest response, and it goes completely quiet in the places that earned quiet.
It comes in two parts. Part One is the story. Part Two is a gospel.
Part One
The Story
Act One
The Making
Everything that built the girl.
A military father who came home to a daughter he hadn't met. A mother she checked on at four years old to see if she was still breathing. A theology of self-erasure taught early and taught well: never say no, and never let them see you sweat.
Ends 1997 · Monticello
Act Two
The Unmaking
Thriving out loud. Coming apart quietly.
Thirty-five years in transportation. A career that worked, a marriage that photographed well, and a slow structural failure underneath both. This is the long act — the one where everything she was good at kept working right up until it didn't.
The golden years, and the bill for them
Act Three
The Remaking
366 days, then the rest of it.
Teen Challenge, arriving October 26, 2020. A hellish year measured in single days. Sobriety on 10/1/2021, graduation on 10/28, and then the strangest part of the whole story: five years of building something real, mostly through obedience and staying still.
Still going · Still funny · Still here
Part Two
The Gospel
Truth from a Wanderer Who Finally Sat Down — a gospel according to a hot mess prophetess. Set in scripture format, chapter and verse, styled after Luke and played completely straight, which is exactly what makes it funny. Thirteen parables, footnote commentary, and fragments that surface all through Part One as Chicken Scratchings.
Kari 0:1–5
Commentary. Before wisdom, there was a spreadsheet. This is the sacred absurdity we honor: that the ones who try hardest to get it right are often the most lost. This is not shame; this is prophecy in the raw.
Kari 2:1–6
Note. Kari 2 opens the Beatitudes. There are more of them, and they get worse.
The Verse Under the Whole Thing
"The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent."Exodus 14:14 · ESV
Which is a genuinely infuriating instruction for a woman who has never once in her life been silent, and has chased a great number of things that were already running the right direction.
A Partial Inventory
When It Hatches
Leave your name and you'll hear the morning it's out — nothing before that, nothing after it that isn't this book.
The Rest of the Flock
She did not chase the chickens.
She became one.
— The Book of Kari