The Story
I Called It Paying Attention.
I spent thirty years in the field, hauling a couch across South Carolina so teenagers in small towns had somewhere to sit and talk about their lives, bouncing down desert roads in Baja, talking to students in Compton, making cheese at 4 AM with some of the best cheesemakers in the world. I was looking for the same thing every time: the moment someone found the words for what they actually believed.
The industry called it word of mouth marketing. I called it paying attention.
My ADHD brain kept me moving. I outran every quiet moment for three decades. I stood on stages in Vegas and Orlando and London preaching the gospel of human connection while I was running from my own.
Then, in August 2024, my legs stopped working. I hit the concrete floor and the person who got up was not the person who fell.
What you'll find on this site is what came back up. Two books in two registers (one memoir, one Southern Gothic fiction), both rooted in the same question: how do we make meaning when the old story stops working?
Geno Church.
Storyteller working in two registers. Memoir and Southern Gothic fiction.
Same obsession in both: how myth makes meaning when the map gives out.
Author of Brains on Fire · The Passion Conversation
The Work ✦ Two Worlds
Volume One · Memoir
The Sasquatch's Roar
Field Notes from the Wilderness of Being Human
Querying Agents
"The trail was the education.
\nThe open country is the life."
When I was fourteen, two boys from Saluda met something in the woods that wasn't supposed to exist. We ran. I spent fifty years pretending I hadn't heard what I heard.
In August of 2024, paralyzed in a hospital bed from an autoimmune disease the doctors called rare, I heard it again. Same wool-blanket silence. Same low roar. Only this time, he sat down at the campfire.
The Sasquatch's Roar is the story of those fifty years, and of what happens when the thing you ran from catches up and asks you to sit a spell.
A memoir about terror and fatherhood, paralysis and recovery, the strange grace of being undone in your sixties. About the encounters that name us before we know we're being named. The book is what happens when you stop explaining the woods and start trusting them.
The book carries field notes inside it. Small invitations to listen to your own woods.
"He didn't roar this time. He just sat down. And the silence between us was the closest I had ever been to home."
From The Sasquatch's Roar
Volume Two ✦ The Other Side of the Tree Line
Fiction · Southern Gothic
Saluda Awakens.
Saluda, South Carolina sits on top of a vine. Brought from Switzerland and planted in soil already charged with Cherokee song, Gullah rootwork, Highland grief and pirate iron, it grew into something the founders never agreed on and never finished. Every twenty-five years, the town wakes up enough to remember.
SALUDA AWAKENS CONCEPT ART
The Legacy Saga
Legacy
Legacy follows the bloodlines tied to the vine. Seven founding families, twenty-five-year cycles, and the descendants who keep getting handed a story they never asked to inherit.
Saluda Awakens opens with Ozzie Meister, a sixteen-year-old synesthete who hears Song Lines other people don't, and learns his pirate ancestor left him more than a name. Vinum Immortale picks up with Finn, a New Orleans loup-garou pulled into the woods between shapes. WolfGator closes the cycle that started in 1878.
Saluda Awakens
Vinum Immortale
Wolfgator
Querying Agents
In Editorial Revision
In Planning & Drafting
Possum Grove, 1878.
Before the Mystica Crew. Before Finn heard his grandmother's voice in an empty room. Before anyone alive remembered why the carnival keeps coming
back to the same ground.
Someone stood very still and let them look.
His bones are in the soil. The vine grew through them.
Previously, with friends
Two books on word of mouth, written
with the team at Brains on Fire.
