Somewhere West of the Last Porch Light

About the Book

“We need more writers like Billy Scrape, who write about all the darkness and all the beauty, who expose themselves at their worst while illuminating the truthful, precious beauty of life. Love and terror, in ourselves and in the world of humans and animals, and the stark godliness of planet Earth, these are his subjects. He captures what makes each of us as unique as our fingerprints and all that is universal.” — PAULA BOMER author of Stalker and Inside Madeleine Somewhere west of the last porch light, America gets strange. There are county fairs and reservation roads, abandoned houses and back-road garages. There are brake failures, acid trips, wildflowers, leather jackets, junkyard mechanics, disappearances and arrivals. Moving between a feral young adulthood and middle age on the road with his family, Billy Scrape writes about belonging and exile, damage and kindness, memory and impermanence, and the people who offer us shelter without ever knowing how badly we need it. Some things disappear completely. Some leave a scorch mark. Some survive for twenty years in a carefully sealed can of paint. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone simply looks up and says: Welcome back.

About the Author

Billy Scrape is a poet, writer, and barroom philosopher based in northern Indiana. His writing explores the overlooked America of back roads, small towns, forgotten places, chance encounters, family, memory, and the peculiar ways people find belonging. He travels whenever possible beyond the interstate, often with his family aboard a converted short bus, looking less for destinations than for the stories that accumulate between them, guided by a tried-and-true philosophy that it is always the journey, never the destination. Somewhere West of the Last Porch Light grew from years of writing about those journeys, alongside stories from an earlier, rougher adulthood and the people and places that continue to shape this particular present.