Welcome to Only Dans!

A few years ago I broke my ankle in two places. I walked into an spiderweb just outside my front door and, in an attempt to avoid falling backwards onto my children or falling off the small concrete slab in front of my home, I crumpled awkwardly. It was cartoonish and embarrassing. The spider was a massive and beautiful orb-weaver, and my walking into it was doubly embarrassing because I knew it was there.

The end result was a bimalleolar fracture. Breaks in both the lateral malleolus (outer-side) as well as the medial malleolus (inner-side) of my right ankle. It sucked, of course, but the injury forced me to embrace down time. I am notorious in my family for pacing. I can eat up whole hours pacing through the living room and kitchen and down the hallway off of which all of our bedrooms branch. Suddenly, I was unable to waste my time in the way I felt most comfortable. Forced idleness can prove productive for me. Without my mindless wandering, I was forced to adapt, and direct my mental energy towards something, anything. I directed it towards a Substack blog, used as a venue to republish out-of-print work and capture and share some of the thoughts bouncing around in my head, rather than let them exist in a state of perpetual restlessness.

The fractures must have been incredibly minor and minute, or perhaps the x-rays missed something, but my down time lasted only a few months, much earlier than the orthopedic doctors predicted. And old habits die hard. Once I was off the crutches and back into my familiar routine, an every-other-week publishing schedule became more difficult to keep up with, and by December, a controversy around Substack policy made the platform seem like a hassle not worth further investing in. It felt like a natural exit point.

Since then, I’ve really only used my Substack as a means to keep up with friends and the publications I enjoy that remain on the platform, but I’ve greatly missed the low-stakes nature of having a venue through which I could continue making sense of the world through creative thinking and writing about art.

Over the last 3 years, in addition to finding new and/or compelling means to stave off insatiable restlessness, I’ve slowly gotten back into the habit of writing and submitting and sometimes, when I’m especially lucky, publishing my work. This means that I should probably get some kind of author website set up again. This sounds presumptuous of me, and it kind of is, but also I’m publishing again and I don’t want to limit writing opportunities for myself.

And so here we are. Only Dans. A writerly “home” of sorts. A space for me to track my publications, share news about hex literary, showcase my artwork, and scream into the void about life and art and all the dumb shit I can’t stop thinking about. If you are moving over from my Substack, I appreciate it. If you are new here, that rips too. I always love when artists share a behind the scenes look at the things that are inspiring them and their work, and that’s what I’m hopeful for with these newsletters. I hope in that way that you, too, find some new inspiration, some revitalized passion, some new way of looking or thinking about the world through them. I don’t plan on sending newsletters out on some specified schedule, but I’d love to aim for 1-2 a month. I’ve started by moving over some out-of-print work that I had on my Substack, mostly for archival purposes, but moving forward everything will be either new or newly republished. Really, it’s a way to trick myself into writing and staying engaged with that part of my life when I don’t have the time, energy, or motivation to devote to the other, publishable kinds of writing I try to do.

I finally had a chance to watch The Long Walk, the 2025 adaption of Stephen King’s 1979 novel. P.S. — this is your spoiler warning or whatever. Originally published under his Richard Bachman pen name, The Long Walk was the first novel that King wrote and, if I’m remembering correctly, the first King novel I read. I came to it in my dad’s battered mass-market copy of the 1985 Bachman Books printing, which collected the first four of King’s books attributed to his alter ego. Twenty-something years later, I can remember very little of the book itself, only particular scenes and the feeling of danger that came with reading it. The Long Walk serves a cruel dystopia in which teenage representatives from each U.S. State embark on competitive walk that only ends when one participant remains. In the film adaption, the winner is promised a large sum of prize money and the guarantee of one wish fulfilled. The losers are dead.

I spend a lot of time thinking about why any particular work of art succeeds or fails at compelling me. I suspect that this is fluid, that as my relationship with art evolves and changes, so too will my expectations, my benchmarks for “good” or “successful” art. Right now, at a time in which most media and art feels hollow, surface-level, and easy to me, I’m most compelled by art that prickles, that makes me feel something, anything. After a few years spent watching horror almost exclusively, I’ve grown somewhat calloused toward the genre. In these regards, I found The Long Walk to be such a pleasant surprise.

Art, and especially horror, allow the audience to (usually safely) experience something they wouldn’t normally. Sometimes, this is only a worldview, a way of thinking, a new persona in which to inhabit, but in speculative art the possibilities are even more endless, limited only by the medium’s technical boundaries (which, too, feel fluid). Whether this is successful feels directly correlated to the work’s ability to evoke a sense of empathy in the audience. The greater empathy we have for any particular character, the closer to them we become. The Long Walk feels so successful because the film is continually building empathy for each character in the audience, while also continually issuing out individualized moments of intense cruelty.

From the film’s first scenes, tension and empathy are established. Ray, the protagonist, rides with his mother to the competition’s starting point. Immediately, it’s obvious that neither party is feeling particularly “good” about the situation, but Ray puts on an air of stoic duty while his mother simply worries, and begs for her son to withdraw. Ray knows the stakes. In the universe the movie/novel establish, this is only another year of the Long Walk. The unease extends to the rest of the participants, all of which having been selected randomly for their inclusion in the annual event, and all of which having had the opportunity to back out. These kids—and they are kids, teenagers—are aware from the start that the chance of a violent death is not only possible, but more likely than not. Turn by turn, we empathize with these participants, understand why they are choosing to participate, and turn by turn, we watch all but one die. Even the antagonistic participant Barkovich, responsible for the death of Rank, the first participant to die, briefly evokes empathy in the audience with an attempt at a redemptive arc before succumbing to madness and killing himself. We empathize with these kids, many of whom are participating for “good” reasons— to better the world, to exact revenge for a totalitarian execution. King gives us characters worth rooting for. We feel their fears, often evident even beneath facades of courage. And when they die, we feel their loss. Hard. As I watch The Long Walk, my body feels like a tightly wound spring, brimming with anxious energy, poised to spring. With each successively killed participant—each kid—the pressure grows. Though there is a particularly effective moment in which several participants are killed during a stretch of hill walking, most kill scenes are individualized, and this proves incredibly successful. We are left, once again, with empathy, as we witness the final moments of one participant after another. King giveth and King taketh away.

The Long Walk also manages, by way of a secondary character, to touch on one of my (anyone’s) greatest fears: to lose one’s child. Ray’s mother, Ginnie, only appears in a few of the film’s scenes: in the opening scenes, as they drive to the starting point, and a short scene later during the walk, but hers is a greatly effective character. Ginnie, like everyone else, understands that Ray has signed up for a death sentence. It brings to mind the trope of grieving mothers/parents in war movies. And Ginnie’s grief is palpable, despite her short screen time. My relationship to horror changed once I became a parent. I’m sure this is because what we find scariest correlates with what would hurt us most to lose. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about since my first kid was born, an essay I’ve been wanting to write for nearly nine years now. In this way, too, I found The Long Walk to be delightfully and particularly prickly.

It feels impossible to watch and think about a movie like The Long Walk without also thinking about the state of American politics. It is not accidental that recent works of dystopian art are so clearly modeled after contemporary political happenings. This is nothing new for dystopian art, but it’s difficult not to feel that we are plummeting deeper into uncharted territory as real world fascism begins to eclipse even fiction in the breadth of its absurd evil. In The Long Walk, the participants are young, naive, blinded by optimism and a sense of patriotism and work ethic they are sold by a totalitarian body that we hardly even see. They are different in many ways—some are gay, some are black, some are married—but most or all seem to want the same thing: an easier life. Though there are moments of tension between the other participants, some teen ribbing, the general vibe (at least for the majority of the walk) seems to be that none of the participants particularly want to see one another die, though they’d all like to win. It’s easy to simplify this into an “us vs them” message. Division among the participants is superficial. The real enemy is the totalitarian regime, but the regime utilizes rhetoric that posits the contest as a good and inspiring thing. And it seems like the rhetoric works for the most part. The film ends on a note of ambiguity. Though the film’s primary antagonist, The Major, is killed, we are given no resolution as to the state of the totalitarian regime, of the competition in general. If I was a betting man, and unfortunately I am, I would bet that The Major’s death will stop nada, that in approximately one year’s time, the Long Walk will begin anew.

Probably, The Long Walk’s intensity is ramped up by my watching it at a time in which government agencies are terrorizing the country and murdering innocent people. The film’s imagery of gunned down participants lying on the concrete are like uncanny parallels to images and videos of the lifeless bodies of protestors. There’s a massive chasm, of course, between the power and importance of these two images—fictional versus real murder—but watching one in context of the other has, for me, intensified the film’s pathos, making it especially effective as a work of horror. That is, The Long Walk is horrifying. I’m interested now in re-reading the novel, though I may have to give myself a little bit of a buffer before re-engaging with King’s cruelty.

In other news, we continue to feature some of the coolest, most interesting writing happening right now on hex literary. We are in the process of figuring out our next reading, which will take place at Current Space in Baltimore on March 6th. This will be our third AWP offsite event, and they are always such a special, beautiful time. I hope to see some of you there!

I have two things coming out soon. A poem—my first published verse poem, no less—coming out in this fucking incredible Burial, and a short story in an exciting newish journal called Doric Literary. I hope you’ll tune in when those drop! I’m also working on a cool special project for a press that I very much love, and can’t wait to share that with you all. And I continue to chip away at a niche essay about a strange and controversial indie game that may never see the light of day, but alas! Onward!

Stay safe, and see you next time,

-DM