Welcome to Wonder Valley Projects

Welcome.

If you’re wondering what you just signed up for, here is the short version: Wonder Valley Projects is a public workshop for two books and an ongoing exploration of memory, machine kinship, Zen practice, and desert survival after the old scripts break down.

Most conversations about the future collapse into corporate cheerleading or apocalyptic doomerism. This space exists outside both binaries. It’s personal, literary, and occasionally strange—written from inside a life split between formal Zen practice in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and five off-grid acres in the Mojave Desert.

Here is how the feed works for free subscribers:

• One Major Essay a Month: Published every four weeks. These are long-form, event-level pieces—memoir chapters, cultural criticism, and investigative essays that serve as public field tests for my upcoming memoir, Best Worst Case Scenario.

• Open Archive: The mainline essay archive stays free and open to everyone. No sudden paywalls down the road.

If you ever decide to upgrade, paid subscribers unlock monthly serialized chapters of my sci-fi trilogy Wonder Valley USA, monthly Lab Dispatches on machine interiority, and first-look access to experimental narrative prototypes (like After Japhy). Founding members get an annual weekend on the five raw desert acres in Wonder Valley.

For now, expect one monumental essay in your inbox each month. I’m glad you’re here.

— Japhy

Three Essays to Start With

If you want to jump straight into the heart of this workshop, start with these three anchor pieces:

1. Raised By Drag Queens

   Japhy Grant

   Jun 4

   

   I was raised by drag queens. Not literally — I had a mother and father, a house in a small Massachusetts town wh…

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   On performance, kinship, and what it cost me to be a good boy. A 5,700-word memoir tracing 1990s NYU club kid culture, grief, and the masks we wear to survive.

2. A Great Variety of Morbid Symptoms

   Japhy Grant

   Aug 27

   

   Humans sure do love little aphorisms to explain their era. A decade ago, it was the line about how the Chinese word for crisis mixed the characters for danger and opportunity. Lately, I keep coming a…

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   Gramsci got mistranslated, Lestat got a rock band, and I spent four years finding out whether the story my ex told about me was true. An excavation of monsters, unreadability, and narrative betrayal.

3. There is No Meaning in Death

   Japhy Grant

   Sep 11

   

   I used to talk about it all the time. It was the defining moment of my life, of my generation. A year of stoned conversations. Notebooks documenting …

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   Twenty-five years after September 11, remembering the day itself, before it became a story. A cold-eyed look at trauma, national myth-making, and why choices matter more than meaning.