Help Bring Keeping It Together While Falling Apart to Readers

Decades of unexplained surgeries. A late-in-life diagnosis that finally explained why. A memoir about what happens after you understand the cause — and how you learn to live with it anyway.

I’m self-publishing this book through my own imprint, Infinite Genius Publishing, and I’m raising funds for the professional editing, cover art, formatting, and publishing costs required to get this book into readers’ hands.

If this story speaks to you, I’d be grateful for your support — or simply for sharing it with someone who might need it.

GoFundMe Campaign for Keeping It Together While Falling Apart.

There is Always More to the Story. My first published piece appeared in Creative Wisconsin Magazine

Some writers pick a lane. T.L. Johnson picked the whole road. From philosophical detective fiction to ecological essays to science fiction that asks what we owe each other — the work spans genres because the questions do. Pull up a chair. There’s a lot to read.

Read and Subsribe on Substack

T.L. Johnson

About the Author

T.L. Johnson

There is a version of this story that begins with the writing. But the honest version begins with the body.

Over the past several years, a rare connective tissue disorder — and more than thirty surgeries — changed the shape of my life in ways I didn’t choose and couldn’t negotiate. The career I’d built as a science educator ended earlier than I’d planned. The days grew smaller. The body, unreliable.

But the stories didn’t stop. If anything, they got louder.

I write across genres — literary fiction, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, personal essay — because no single room has ever been large enough to hold everything I want to say. My work tends to circle the same questions: what do we owe each other, who gets to decide, and what does it cost to stay human in a world that keeps finding new ways to make that difficult. Sometimes I ask those questions through a philosophical English detective with a taste for the absurd. Sometimes, through a former science teacher who just wants to understand how we got here.

I am, in the end, a lifelong reader who became a lifelong writer. A former scientist who never stopped finding the world astonishing. A person who believes, without apology, that stories are not decorative — they are how we survive.

My work has appeared in Creative Wisconsin, and I write regularly on Substack, where the conversation is ongoing and the door is always open.

This site is not an archive. It’s a beginning.

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