My name is Bryce Campbell. I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina — homeschooled, barefoot in the marsh, never quite learning how to sit still.

I know exactly where the writing started. I was six, in the back of my parents’ Chrysler minivan on a cold South Carolina morning. The heater was drowning me in stale air. I said something. Nothing landed. I said it louder. Still nothing. Then my dad looked up into the rearview mirror, saw me, and without a word cracked the window. I shoved my face into that little opening and thought — I can breathe. I had been heard.

I’ve spent most of my life since trying to recreate that moment. Not the fear. The part where someone looks up.

When I was seventeen, two things happened in the same year. My father was diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer and given months to live. And I was taken advantage of by someone older. I spent those months driving him to chemo and sitting at home not knowing what to do with any of it. Then I booked a flight to Geneva and walked the Alps for two weeks. I’d worked fast-food overtime to save $4,000. I needed somewhere to put it.

Coming home, I borrowed his truck and drove west. I was somewhere in rural Idaho when my mother called crying. My younger brother had taken his life. I flew home and spent the following months in the only place that made any sense — the wilderness. Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, wherever I could put a tent up and be alone with it. Under the canopy of an Appalachian forest one evening, I prayed to someone I wasn’t sure existed. That was the beginning of something.

My dad, against every odd, is still alive. He made it past five years with terminal Stage IV pancreatic cancer — something that happens in less than one percent of cases.

I’ve been writing about all of it ever since. First photographs with no words, then captions I hoped someone would hear, then longer letters. People started writing back to say I’d put something into words they’d been carrying. That felt like the window being opened. I still work with my hands when I can — carpentry has a way of keeping the rest honest — and the free weekly dispatch, Far Out, is the main form the writing takes now.

I drove 12,000 miles to the Arctic Circle. I’ve been to Alaska, New Zealand, Canada, the American West more times than I can count. I married Grace, a New Zealander, and we’re still figuring out what a life looks like between South Carolina, a Toyota Tundra, and New Zealand.

I found peace and I found God in the wilderness. I think others can too. That’s why the work is public — so that whoever is still in the back seat asking for the window to be opened might know they’re not the only one.

— Bryce