Travis Heights follows your journey from a violent 1970s Austin childhood to military service, career survival, and a fraught final reckoning with the father whose love and harm shaped your life. Why was this an important book for you to write?

For most of my adult life I carried that story alone. After I left home, I “put my feelings in a box in the back of my head.” The Marines taught me to accomplish the mission and move on: you don’t dwell, you don’t complain, you drive on. That worked well enough until it didn’t. 

When I called my father near Austin, and he needed help, I had a choice: stay stuck in twenty-five years of distance, or go get him. Writing the book was how I made sense of everything that led to how I got to where I am today. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d find in that box. 

Decades of compartmentalized experience don’t just sit quietly forever. They shape how you lead, how you love, and how you show up for the people who need you. And here’s what that taught me: the mission I thought I’d completed — surviving, building a career, moving on — was only half the work. The other half was understanding what I’d carried to get there, and deciding what was worth keeping. 

I also kept thinking about the kids who are living what I lived. If one person reads this and decides to ask for help instead of walking out the door alone, it was worth every uncomfortable page.

How did you choose which “rules” to include, and did writing them change how you understood those lessons?

The rules chose themselves. Each one represents an important life lesson for me at that time. I’d be deep in a scene, like leaving home, the library, or hitchhiking, and I’d realize there was something I learned there that I still carry. 

Some of them I was proud of. Others I had to sit with because writing them out made me see they were survival strategies that had outlived their usefulness. But I still needed to capture them, examine them.

The Marine Corps gave me a framework for rules and discipline, but it also reinforced the walls I’d built around the harder stuff. Putting the rules on the page forced me to ask whether I’d actually learned what I thought I had. What I found was that some of those rules had been running my life quietly for decades — shaping decisions I thought I was making freely. That’s the thing about survival mode: it works so well you forget you’re still in it.

Was it difficult to write about your father and Beulah with both honesty and complexity?

My father was the hardest. Beulah was easier in a way. The hypocrisy, the racism, and the manipulation were clear-cut, and time had given me enough distance to name them plainly. 

My father was different. He could be genuinely warm and funny and present, and then the switch flipped. Writing him meant holding both of those things at once without letting either one cancel the other out. I didn’t want to write a villain. I wanted to write the man I actually knew — which was more unsettling than a villain would have been. Because if he were just a monster, I could have put him down and walked away clean. 

The harder truth is that I loved him, and that love is what made the distance of twenty-five years hurt as much as anything he ever did. Writing that cost me something. But it’s also the most honest thing in the book. And I think that honesty is what readers feel. The people who’ve reached out to me after reading it don’t say “I hated your father.” They say “I understood him.” That’s the response I was hoping for. Not absolution, not condemnation, but recognition. Because most of us didn’t grow up with monsters. We grew up with complicated people who didn’t always know what to do with us.

What do you hope readers from chaotic or abusive families take away from your story?

That reconciliation doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen. You don’t have to forgive and forget, and you don’t have to stay stuck in the wound either. What I found — slowly, and not without resistance — was that I could tell the truth about what my father did and still choose not to let it define the rest of my life. 

That distinction matters, because a lot of people I’ve talked to believe those are the only two options: bury it or be consumed by it. There’s a third way, and it’s harder than either of those, but it’s the one that actually lets you move forward. 

I also want readers to know that asking for help is not weakness. I wish I had. If you’re in a situation like the one I grew up in, there are people who will show up for you. Covenant House International exists for exactly that reason, and ten percent of the net profits from this book go to support their work with homeless, runaway, and trafficked kids.

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