Origin Stories

How HOME OF THE HAPPY Came to Be, From a Publishing Perspective

One of the earliest “drafts” of HOME OF THE HAPPY—a homemade chapbook of sorts created for a Creative Nonfiction class at LSU.

I hate telling people that I wrote a book, lol.

This is not to say that I don’t want to talk about the book. Oh, I will talk to you for hours about this book, if you’ll let me. It’s why I started this newsletter in the first place.

What I’m talking about is the more cliché, but frequent, instance of it coming up out of context—when a friend with perfectly good intentions tells their acquaintance that Jordan is an author. I think my fellow authors will recognize the inevitable small-talk shuffle that ensues, the polite and obligatory: Oh, what is it about?—to which I must urgently conjure a summary of the family saga that’s consumed my life for much of the past decade in a socially-appropriate three sentences or so, unable to resist my overwhelming instinct to downplay the whole thing as much as possible.

Well, in the eighties my great-grandfather was … well, kidnapped and murdered. Right, I mean it’s fine. I didn’t know him, but yeah it was this massive terrible thing … and yeah it’s the story of that, and of all that came after. Yes, the case was solved … but it’s complicated.

I’ve shared before about the unsettling vulnerability of opening the doors on this project, allowing the rest of the world to stroll into a thing that has been so private, so mine for so long. But it is also what this has been about the entire time: saying things unsaid, naming things unnamed.

So there is the writing. But then there is this oh-so-necessary business of sharing, of publishing. For writers and non-writers alike, this process and industry is one cloaked in a certain amount of mystery—shaped by a system built equally upon total subjectivity and the hard facts of profit margins, as well as a certain degree of randomness. Every author’s story of how their book got made is different, and most readers are never made aware at all of the work that went into making it once the writing was over.

In the next few editions of In the Home of the Happy, I thought I’d spend some time sharing a little about my personal publishing experience thus far—addressing questions I often receive about the process of actually selling and making a book like this, and what stage I’m at currently.

But first, the beginning:

How did I come to write this book in the first place?

The earliest drafts of HOME OF THE HAPPY came out of some of my first creative writing classes at LSU, back in 2017. I was studying English, but had early on in college switched my concentration from Creative Writing to the “more practical” Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. Hoping to graduate as part of the LSU Honors College, I had been sniffing out a subject for my undergraduate thesis—and by chance had landed in an “Introduction to Immersion Journalism” class taught by the LSU English Department’s new hire, Professor Joshua Wheeler—whose specialty was in teaching nonfiction writing.

My experience in that class set me on the path of cultural, regional journalism that today encompasses much of my career (in fact, the article I completed for the course was the first story I ever published in Country Roads magazine, where I am now on staff as Managing Editor—you can read it here). At the end of the semester I approached Professor Wheeler with the idea of writing a longform article about a story my dad had only recently started telling me, the story of Aubrey LaHaye’s murder.

When I finished recounting the story, as I understood it at the time, to Professor Wheeler—he told me that I had something far beyond the scope of an article. If I wanted, this could be a book. With him acting as my mentor, I spent my last three semesters at LSU exploring how I wanted to tell this story—reading true crime memoirs voraciously, interviewing my family members; and writing scenes of bodies in bayous, old ladies tied to bedposts, cigar smoke swirling about the living room.

(One of the most impactful things Professor Wheeler taught me during this time was how to dissect, and write about, my home. The same year I graduated, his debut essay collection about his home of New Mexico proved a masterful example of this. Find his book, titled ACID WEST, here.)

What I ended up creating for my Honors Thesis was not the book in whole, but instead a “book proposal”—which is exactly what it sounds like: a massive document that argues for why this book should be made, which included a summary and outline, “comps” (or comparables—successful books that would have a similar audience to my project), and the few chapters I had completed thus far.

Much has changed about the project since I put together that first proposal back in 2018. In fact, at that time, I was calling the book Evangeline: A murder on the Cajun prairie. Here I’ll share an excerpt from the proposal that served as my honors thesis:

“While I conjure the ‘joie de vivre’ of Acadiana and its characters, I also struggle to strip it away, to look beyond its romanticism and locate the darker realities of the Cajun fairy tale I was told every day of my childhood. What is it about this strange place, this society, this people—what are the evil influences at work here that could possibly add up to the moment in which an old man is ripped from his home, knife to his back, then bludgeoned to death and left in a bayou?”

After graduation, armed with this document, I was all set to begin the process of finding a publisher. The first step was to find a literary agent.

More on that next time . . .

More for Louisiana True Crime Junkies:

This week, Country Roads magazine released a new episode of DETOURS, in which I and my colleagues James Fox-Smith, Alexandra Kennon, and Chris Turner-Neal dive into some of Louisiana’s wildest true crime stories—including the wild history of Euzebe Vidrine, the only man Evangeline Parish ever hanged. Listen in, here:

& Some Personal News:

Meet Ziggy, the newest member of our family! He is all legs and ears and has totally consumed most of my days these past month. He’s smart as hell and an excellent snuggler, but ask me again about the potty training in a few weeks. Big sisters Harley and Pippa are warming to him, if a little slowly—but he’s on a mission to earn cuddle rights with each of them.