Welcome to J. Carrol Sain on Substack

For more than 15 years, I’ve made a partial living as a freelance writer. You may have viewed my work in The Bitter Southerner, Sporting Classics, Outdoor Life, The Food and Environment Reporting Network, The Drake, Hatch Fly Fishing, or some other regional or national publication. Most of my better writing has centered on the connection between people and place and has been guided by my rural perspective. I am a product of rural culture in every way

Here I aim to look even more thoughtfully at the connection between people and place, to take note of how the land molds attitudes and worldviews. I want to explore all of this rich and often confounding culture with a combination of gritty sincerity, pretty writing, and clearheaded understanding. And I hope that you can let me know how I’m doing in regards to those goals.

The site has three categories:

Circles, Songs, and Seasons will feature prose about the wild things (and my interactions with them) who live in the backyard, the sprawling wilderness areas within a short drive of my home, and all places in between. Because the wild is not “out there.” It’s everywhere. Rural culture is tightly tethered to the wild in solidly utilitarian ways. But there is also a vestigial connection rarely discussed or explored nowadays, the shadow of ancestral cultures with blurred lines between the practical day-to-day and the divine. This sweetest of spots is where a lot of my nature essays reside.

The Philosophical Hillbilly is a journal of my thoughts not directly related to anything. There’s really no telling what you might find there so reader beware.

Rural Reimagined is fiction, a genre I am just beginning to explore.

For my longtime readers (I think there might be a dozen or so), you will see some recycled work on here presented as “new-to-them” for followers just coming on board. I promise at least one original item every month—fresh from my fingertips, though, it will have been chewed on obsessively prior to publication. My muses move in strange and confounding ways, and they often take lengthy spells between visits. However, my professional accountability to you guarantees at least one per month, muses be damned. But I suspect that from time to time there will be multiples.

Right now, every post older than six months is paywalled. While I would love nothing more than to make an entire living from here, the primary reason I write is to shift this world just a little bit for the better. It’s hard for me to reckon that purpose with demanding money to read my attempts, but it’s also hard to see why folks would pay for something they can get for free. So only paid subscribers can see those old posts. It’s not much, but it is something. As I wrestle with the whole stomach-churning notion of asking for money to read my words, this may change. In fact, the paywall has shifted numerous times since this Substack was started.

I am nothing if not conflicted.

Much obliged,
Johnny

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