Being Jonas Wilder: The Mystery Was Hiding in an Album

I research people’s lives for a living, or at least, that’s the role I stepped into to write this one. Timelines, patterns, the things people don’t notice about themselves because they’re too close to see it. Mark Firehammer became one of my subjects almost by accident. He’s also the reason I exist as a name at all. J.W. Kindbloom is the pen name I write under when I need enough distance from my own life to actually see it clearly.

I wasn’t looking for a hidden structure. I was building a straightforward account of one man’s life, in fiction, for a novel called The Echo and the Voice. But somewhere in the timeline, I noticed something that didn’t add up the way it should have. Eleven songs written across four decades, for entirely unrelated reasons, lined up. In sequence. Telling a story none of them told on their own. Those eleven songs make up the album Songs in the Key of Return, and the novel is what finally revealed why they belonged together.

I hadn’t seen it, not as Mark, anyway. It took the distance of writing as someone else to lay forty years side by side and notice the pattern. The character I built to carry that discovery, Jonas Wilder, turned out to be close enough to my own life that I decided to step into the role myself, on stage, under my own name.

That discovery is now a live performance, Being Jonas Wilder: one man, a guitar, and seventy minutes built from the same eleven songs and the story behind them. Part memoir, part reveal, and still a little unbelievable even after everything I found.

See where the discovery is being performed, hosted by the Creative Humanity Alliance →