Five Books, One Journey

This has been an unusual year for me as a writer. Maybe the best kind of unusual.

Over the course of 2026, I’ve watched several very different pieces of my writing life find their way into books. Three novellas set along the edge of a canyon. Five psychological science fiction stories that travel considerably farther from home. And a novel about a mostly unknown poet whose words begin changing the world around him.

On the surface, they may not seem to belong together.

I think they do.

And on Saturday, October 3, from 4:00–6:00 p.m., I’ll be at Henry’s Books in downtown Spearfish for an Author Open House celebrating all five of them: the three books currently available in the Canyon Song Novella Series, the October 1 release of The Immense Silence, and a preview of my new novel, Ed, which releases October 31.

It feels a little like gathering several different roads I’ve traveled into one room.

The Canyon

The three Canyon Song novellas—Canyon Song, Fault Line, and Spirit Rich—are probably the books most visibly connected to the place where I live and to some of the questions I’ve carried for a long time.

Their central character, Aubrey, is a former small-town minister who has left the pulpit after his own religious unraveling. He now lives near a canyon and makes his living doing something quieter: writing songs for people.

Memorial songs. Songs of reconciliation. Songs that try to say something people have not quite been able to say for themselves. That premise brought together two parts of my life that have been intertwined for decades: story and song.

I’ve spent much of my life writing songs, producing music, writing poetry and prose, teaching, working in theater, and sitting with people as they try to make meaning from their own experiences. I’ve also spent a good deal of my life inside questions of faith—and eventually questions about faith.

Those things inevitably found their way into Aubrey.

But the canyon became more than a setting. In these books, it is almost another character. The canyon doesn’t solve anybody’s problems. It doesn’t offer tidy spiritual lessons. It doesn’t tell Aubrey what to believe.

It simply remains.

I’ve become increasingly interested in the possibility that some of the most important things in our lives are not things we conquer, explain, or resolve. Sometimes what we need is something—or someone—capable of remaining present while we learn how to listen.

Each Canyon Song story begins with a song commission, but each one widens into something larger.

Canyon Song is, in many ways, Aubrey’s own story—the unraveling of a vocation and an identity, and the discovery that losing certainty does not necessarily mean losing everything sacred.

Fault Line moves into the painful territory where belief and love collide. A former church elder asks Aubrey to write a song for his estranged daughter, and what begins as a commission becomes a test of whether relationship can survive when neither person can simply surrender what they believe.

Then Spirit Rich widens the circle again. A teenage boy asks Aubrey to write a protest song opposing a proposed mining project in the canyon. The developer behind the project is the boy’s father. As the community divides, Aubrey eventually realizes that an essential set of voices has largely been left out of the conversation: Lakota people whose relationship with this land reaches far beyond the town, the mine, or the current controversy.

That part of the story grows directly from another important strand of my own life. For more than a decade, much of my professional work has involved listening to Indigenous elders and educators and helping create resources through which their stories and teachings can be heard. That work has changed the way I think about land, knowledge, story, relationship, and listening itself.

In Spirit Rich, those questions become part of the fiction. What does it mean for a place to be rich? And who gets to decide?

Then Things Got Stranger

If the Canyon Song books remain fairly close to the canyon, my next book wanders into considerably stranger territory.

The Immense Silence, releasing October 1, is a collection of five psychological science fiction stories.

I’ve always loved speculative fiction, particularly the kind that uses a surprising premise to ask a very human question. That is what these stories try to do.

A music producer becomes convinced that silence is not the absence of sound but something much larger beneath reality itself.

A man attempts to escape a hyper-networked civilization only to discover that leaving a system does not necessarily mean the system has stopped reaching for you.

Ancient forms of companionship evolve into immense structures of ritual and belief.

A consciousness deeply entangled with the natural world confronts humanity’s relentless appetite for expansion.

And a man obsessed with controlling how other people perceive him becomes trapped in an increasingly horrifying cycle of self-consumption.

The landscapes are different from those in Canyon Song. The worlds are stranger. But underneath them, I hear many of the same questions. What happens when relationship becomes system? What happens when identity becomes performance? What happens when something living becomes something we feel compelled to measure, optimize, control, worship, monetize, or consume? And what happens to us in the process?

The title story, The Immense Silence, probably reveals something about why these stories still feel connected to the rest of my writing.

For years, my work as an educator, songwriter, facilitator, and writer has kept returning me to the importance of attention. Listening before speaking. Wonder before certainty. Relationship before abstraction.

Maybe silence belongs somewhere in that same family. Not silence as emptiness. Silence as the place from which listening becomes possible.

And Then There Is Ed

At the end of October comes the largest and perhaps strangest of these projects.

Ed, releasing October 31, is a speculative fiction novel told through twenty-five interconnected stories unfolding across twenty-five months in Chicago.

Ed is a poet. Not a successful poet. Mostly, he fills notebooks.

Then a mysterious organization called APIS offers him five thousand dollars a month to submit one poem each month to something they describe as a new form of “poetic intelligence.” Their stated goal is wonderfully grandiose:

Restore poetry to human culture.

Ed says yes. He probably should have asked more questions.

Slowly, the poems begin moving beyond the page. Something in the city changes. Conversations shift. Grief changes shape. Machines seem to sing. Floodwater reveals things people would rather leave buried. Heat alters the way people hear sirens. Ordinary places—a bus stop, a workplace, a neighborhood—begin carrying strange new emotional resonance.

And Ed begins to understand that the real question may not be whether poetry can change the world. It may be whether any poet—or any person—should have that much power to do it.

In some ways, Ed brings together more pieces of my life than anything I’ve written.

There is poetry in it. Music. Technology. Education. Spirituality. Creativity. Artificial intelligence. Community. Grief. Humor. Friendship. The strange human desire to turn everything into meaning. And, perhaps most importantly, relationship. Because the people surrounding Ed keep resisting his tendency to turn life into an idea.

They keep insisting on being people. Not symbols. Not data. Not metaphors.

People.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

Maybe These Books Aren’t So Different After All

When I put the five books next to one another, I’m struck less by their differences than I expected to be.

• A songwriter beside a canyon.

• A father trying to love his daughter across a divide.

• A teenager trying to protect a place he loves.

• A man fleeing a technological civilization.

• A consciousness entangled with the natural world.

• A poet discovering that his words may possess more influence than anyone should have.

They are all, in one way or another, standing at the same threshold.

What happens when our ideas become more important than the people, places, and relationships they were supposed to serve?

That question has followed me through much of my work. It has been there in classrooms. It has been there in songwriting. It has been there in my work with educators and Indigenous elders. It has been there in conversations about faith and doubt. It has been there in the books I’ve written about learning, relationship, identity, and story. And now it has apparently followed me into fiction.

I’m okay with that. Maybe writers spend their whole lives writing variations on a handful of questions they cannot quite answer. These may be some of mine.

Come Visit October 3

That is part of why I’m especially glad to be gathering these books together at Henry’s Books in Spearfish on Saturday, October 3, from 4:00–6:00 p.m.

The Canyon Song books are already out. The Immense Silence will have been released two days earlier, on October 1. And Ed will still be a few weeks away from its October 31 release, so I’ll be able to talk a little about what is coming next.

But I don’t want the afternoon to feel like a formal book launch. I’d rather it feel like an open house. Come in. Look at the books. Ask me questions. Talk about stories, songs, writing, the canyon, science fiction, poetry, faith, technology, creativity—or whatever else comes up.

There will be books and signings and refreshments, certainly. But mostly, I hope there will be conversation. Because after all the pages and poems and imagined worlds, I keep coming back to the same thing.

The work begins in solitude. But it becomes meaningful in relationship.

Author Open House, Saturday, October 3, 2026 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.Henry’s Books | 112 N. Main Street | Spearfish, South Dakota

I’d love to see you there.

— Scott