The Last Punk in Miners Creek

What if the moment that nearly killed you was the one that finally told the truth?

Ten years sober, Jared Shackelford stands at an AA podium when a simple question pulls him back into the night he almost died. What follows is a reckoning—guided by memory, music, and the ghost of a boy he once loved.

Raised poor in a Southern trailer park by an alcoholic father, Jared grows up skating cracked pavement, clinging to punk rock, and searching for belonging wherever he can find it. As a queer kid on the margins, he builds a family out of misfits, bands, and late nights at the skatepark—until love, loss, and addiction begin to pull him apart.

The Last Punk in Miners Creek is a raw, lyrical coming-of-age novel about class, queerness, chosen family, and the seductive pull of self-destruction. By turns brutal and tender, it asks what survives when everything else falls away—and whether it's ever too late to build something worth staying alive for.