Story & Lesson Highlights with J.D. Mathes of Redlands

We’re looking forward to introducing you to J.D. Mathes. Check out our conversation below.

J.D., a huge thanks to you for investing the time to share your wisdom with those who are seeking it. We think it’s so important for us to share stories with our neighbors, friends and community because knowledge multiples when we share with each other. Let’s jump in: Have any recent moments made you laugh or feel proud?
I am proud that my oldest daughter, she created the artwork for my book cover, created a bookmark, and original postcards featuring blurbs of authors who reviewed my memoir Of Time and Punishment. Also, 8×12 archival prints will be made of these postcards and exhibited in an art gallery where I will give a reading with her present.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I grew up a feral child in the deserts of the American Southwest and loved to read library books. I am a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, the result of which is Of Time and Punishment: A Memoir, published on October 28, 2025. Other books of mine include Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire, an essay collection Fever and Guts: A Symphony, The Journal West: Poems, and Shipwrecks and Other Stories.

I’m currently working on a novel, Flight of the Monarchs, about a young man’s struggle after his arrest to learn to draw to help him cope with prison, but finds backlash from the authorities and other inmates who want to crush his freedom to create.

Among things I’ve done to support my writing, and two daughters have been a wildland firefighter on a helicopter-rappel crew, oilfield chemist, and in logistics at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica where I led the Southernmost Writers Workshop in the World. www.jdmathes.com

Okay, so here’s a deep one: What relationship most shaped how you see yourself?
Everything changed the night I sat and held my then wife Kathy’s hand and watched as she struggled in labor for hours. We didn’t know the gender of the baby, so I kept talking in the general – the baby or the kid. You can push this kid out no problem. I felt it would be any second, but each drew out in the darkened room until it became limbo. Each squeeze of her hand I thought would break this moment into a before and after with the birth of our child. But it wasn’t to be so. The doctor came in and took me out to the hallway. He explained the baby’s head had stuck somehow in the mother’s pelvis. He needed to perform emergency surgery to save her at least, but without surgery, odds were they’d both die. I said to get to work. Please. My heart thumped hard in my chest. Save them from Death. Please save them from oblivion.

They outfitted me in scrubs and a mask. I stood at her head. Breathing deep to stay focused, I tried not to appear nervous or useless, even though I felt both. A nurse told me to just touch Kathy’s shoulders as it’d help calm her. I did and felt her body trembling. I watched as the nurses swabbed her abdomen with antiseptic. They placed some kind of material over her with a little gap in it. The doctor stood by with his gloved hands in front of him like a supplicant. The nurses parted and the doctor stepped between them. One nurse took a scalpel from a tray and handed it to him. He lined it up over Kathy’s belly and hovered it. I waited for the blade to come down. It looked like he wasn’t sure. He lowered the blade over the gap in the cloth. Her belly, reddish with the antiseptic, looked fake, but when the blade cut her, blood came. A nurse next to the doctor looked up and smiled with her eyes over her mask at me. I saw them pull Sophia from Kathy like a magic trick and announce a girl. I heard her cry. Of all the odd things, I noticed for the first time they had been playing Elvis Presley over the speakers in the surgery room during the operation. A nurse rushed off with my daughter to check her over. The nurse came to me and handed me Sophia swaddled and with a little cap with her fine dark hair escaping under the edge.

Stunned by the emotional upwelling, I whispered Walt Whitman’s poem, “O Me! O Life!” over Sophia’s head in the darkened room hours past midnight, not knowing what else to do. Who knows what soft syllables lodge in an infant’s brain? For years, I’d wandered, confused without knowing it. What was it to think you knew what you were doing only to discover you had been living in a lie? Living someone else’s version of you? Years, I’d chased jobs and adventure, still believing I needed to go out and experience things to write. I was so busy experiencing I wasn’t writing and still felt no one would care about what I had to say anyway. It didn’t help I was still under the delusion that going to school for writing was a waste of time. Some failure of character, I’m sure.

The baby in my arms broke my head open and shone a light in it. Epiphany, revelation, enlightenment, a sudden striking of consciousness. It was surely what the Buddhist heroin smuggler I’d known in prison meant when he said enlightenment will come when you’re not looking for it. It’ll just be there. Like the full moon. I vowed to return to college for writing. To be the man I was. I needed to do it for her too. How could I tell her it was important if I didn’t earn a degree? 

If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
Listen to the advice you are given in the first place. What parent hasn’t had one of their kids run up and with the news of something they didn’t know without realizing the parent had already told them? In my case, I started writing screenplays and was warned to always have a contract first. I have an issue with not wanting to seem pushy or a pain in the ass to work with. So the first time, I said, I wanted a contract, the two producers said they would send one. I trusted them and reworked their script while waiting for the contract to come from their lawyers. I finished the rewrite and sent it to them. They then fired me. I had no legal recourse. The next time, I demanded a contract, called an option, in this case giving the producer exclusive rights to the script while he found funding and produced the film. To be safe, I went through my own entertainment attorney to go over the paperwork. It was signed by both parties on December 31, 2019. I had deferred the normal up-front writer’s fees as required by the Writers’ Guild for a fee when he secured funding for the feature and a percentage of the box office. The project dragged on, made longer by the pandemic. We’d worked all year on a short script for a proof of concept and scouting locations, then shot the film in June of 2021. The director/producer and I had become close friends so when the option lapsed, I asked him to send a new contract. He said sure. I worked on revisions for the feature script through to 2022 when he just abandoned the project. A friend of his had offered him a job. I was left again without anything to show for the years of work. It sucked. I was devastated having invested so much time, money, and emotional energy in trying to bring this to the screen. It reminded me of a saying from my car salesperson days: If you can’t screw your friends and family, then who can you screw?

I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. What’s a belief you used to hold tightly but now think was naive or wrong?
I used to believe going to college to be a writer was a waste of time and that my class of kid didn’t become writers. We went out and got real jobs or joined the military and if we went to college, it was to be in the sciences and not to be a writer or an artist. I was told writers needed to get real life experience like Hemingway and Twain and not bother with college. I needed to study chemical engineering if I went to college, something I could get a job doing to make a living. Maybe later, write, but not as a profession.

I did start writing, but on my own, without strong critical feedback, it wasn’t that great. I learned later I have some sort of mental glitch the makes me switch tenses, miss typos, and misspell words I know. It’s weird to be able to read something by others but miss it in my own work. And if you don’t know it’s there, editors just reject your work out of hand as being sloppy. And I also learned both Hemingway and Twain were naturally better writers but also worked in the newspaper business and in the case of Hemingway, had friends and mentors like Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, in addition to the newspaper editors he worked for. Such is the myth of the lone genius that keeps us working class kids in our place with our own self-doubt. What’s more, I didn’t know the difference between criticism and ridicule or that professional writers were once awkward and crappy writers before their long apprenticeship to the craft. I labored under the illusion that artists, writers, actors, musicians, or singers can just do what they do. Sure, I understood that they practiced, but the idea that they first sucked at what they chose to do never occurred to me, especially writers. It was once said to me by a colleague that teaching writing is the hardest subject to teach because students think they’ve been writing since elementary school, so know how to write and in most cases think they are better than the professor or believe the professor doesn’t understand their vision and wants to change “their voice” when they offer criticism.

It took the birth of my first daughter for me to find the courage to be true to who I was and go all in on learning to be a writer. I gained the confidence to be in the same room with real writers and have conversations, even though I was worried I’d say something that would unmask me as a poseur or ignorant bumpkin. Although the self-doubt and the nagging sense that I was wasting my life never left, I’ve learned to quell my class-conscious and insecure voice telling me I didn’t belong.

Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. What are you doing today that won’t pay off for 7–10 years?
That depends on what you mean by payoff. Leave a body of work my wife and kids will be proud of will be a payoff. But monetarily pretty much everything I do as a writer and an artist will cost me money and the payoff then in capitalist terms will be a loss. The same with wide spread recognition/fame or recognized by the establishment, given how rare that is in my field. But I will keep doing what I do even as I know it won’t “payoff” in 7-10 years..

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jdmathes.com
• Instagram: @jdmathes
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JDMathesII
• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/@jdmathes
• Other: https://substack.com/@jdmathes?