LITERARY TITAN

Baker Vaughan follows a man in his fifties who leaves a polished but hollow life in New York, heads to Idaho, and tries to reclaim a calling to the priesthood that he abandoned decades earlier. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The setup came directly from my own life, though Baker’s journey diverges significantly from mine in the details. Sixteen years ago, I left New York City for Idaho—traded the polished surfaces and relentless pace for something quieter, more spacious. Five years after that move, I began discerning a call to the Episcopal priesthood. I spent two years in that process before ultimately deciding it wasn’t my path.

What I discovered during those two years became the heart of this story.

As a parishioner, I liked the church, but I didn’t love it. I found meaning in the liturgy, community in the congregation, and solace in the rituals. But when I stepped into discernment—when I began to see the church not from the pews but from the inside—everything shifted. I encountered the business of it all: the politics, the bureaucracy, the institutional machinery that keeps a church running. Budgets, committees, and personnel issues. The gap between the idealized faith I’d held and the messy, human reality of the institution was… painful. Disorienting.

That disillusionment is what I wanted to explore with Baker. He comes to Idaho carrying an old, half-remembered sense of calling—something he abandoned decades earlier. Unlike me, he had that youthful pull toward the priesthood, but he never pursued it. Now, in his fifties, with his polished New York life feeling increasingly hollow, he decides to try again.

And like me, he’s never seen behind the curtain before. He’s been a believer, perhaps even devout, but always from a distance. When he finally steps into the inner workings of the church, he discovers it’s not what he imagined. The sacredness is still there, but so is the machinery—the compromises, the egos, the institutional inertia.

I wrote this story because that reckoning felt important to me. Not as a condemnation of the church, but as an honest exploration of what happens when our ideals meet reality. What do we do when something we’ve held as sacred reveals itself to be deeply, stubbornly human? How do we reconcile faith with institution? Those questions haunted me during my own discernment, and they haunt Baker throughout his journey in Idaho.

The novel resists the idea of “starting over” and leans into excavation. When did that distinction become central to Baker’s story?

Baker’s excavation is multifaceted—he’s digging into all three layers. The first layer is his younger self. He has to examine why he abandoned the priesthood impulse decades ago. The concrete reason is clear: his wife died in the middle of seminary. But what he’s been wrestling with for the next forty years is whether that was the right decision—whether grief was reason enough to walk away, or whether he used it as permission to run from something he was already afraid of. What was he running from? What was he running toward? The loss is real and devastating, but there’s something else in that younger version of himself—some fear or ambition or wound—that he never fully understood. He can’t reclaim a calling without understanding why he let it go, and whether the reason he’s told himself all these years is the whole truth. The second layer is his faith foundations. Baker has held an idealized version of faith for most of his life—a set of spiritual assumptions that shaped him, or perhaps shaped the absence of a life. Now he has to question those foundations. Were they ever solid? Were they his, or were they inherited, unexamined? Excavation here means asking whether the faith he thought he had was ever real, or just a story he told himself. The third layer is the church’s institutional reality. This is where he uncovers what the church actually is beneath the preconceptions—the business behind the sacredness. The politics, the compromises, the human messiness. It’s not what he imagined, and that gap forces him to reckon with whether his calling was to an ideal that never existed.

You treat religion as complicated, entangled, and sometimes uncomfortable. Why was it important not to present faith as easy or purely redemptive?

As the author, I was deliberately avoiding the redemptive arc—the one where disillusionment becomes cathartic, where seeing the church’s flaws leads to clarity and renewal. That felt dishonest to me. In my experience, and I think in most people’s experience, faith doesn’t work that way. The complications don’t resolve. They accumulate.

That’s where Karl Thompson came in. He’s a former bishop, and he becomes Baker’s mentor. But Karl isn’t offering redemption or answers. He’s already lived through his own disillusionment about the church. He’s seen the machinery, the politics, the human messiness of it all. And he’s made a kind of peace with the fact that faith and the institutional church aren’t perfect—that they can’t be separated from human limitation.

What’s crucial is that Karl’s peace isn’t clarity. It’s not that he’s figured it out or found a way to reconcile the contradictions. He’s simply accepted that the complications are irreducible. That faith will always be entangled with institution, with ego, with failure.

And Baker sees him as fundamentally human first. Not as a spiritual authority. Karl is flawed, tired, and sometimes cynical. He’s a man who’s learned to live with discomfort rather than transcend it. That prevents the novel from treating him as someone who offers easy answers or models a “right” way through.

I think that’s more honest to the actual texture of faith and human experience. We want religion to be clean, to offer us certainty or transformation. But it’s made of people. It’s compromised from the beginning. The peace, if there is any, comes from accepting that—not from resolving it from sitting with the entanglement rather than trying to escape it.

Baker is in his fifties, which is unusual for a “coming-of-self” narrative. Why tell this story at that stage of life? Do you believe it’s ever too late for transformation?

I don’t think it’s ever too late for transformation. But I also don’t think transformation at fifty looks like what we imagine it does at twenty-five. There are real constraints. The Episcopal church has a mandatory retirement age of seventy-two. Learning becomes harder as we age—that’s just biology. So Baker is in this liminal space where he’s old enough to know what he’s risking, young enough that he could theoretically still pursue priesthood, but acutely aware that the window is closing.

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