What I found in Panther City

It was a good run.

I moved to Fort Worth in the spring of 2022. I was wholly ignorant about this place and, frankly, I wasn’t thrilled to be living in a city that I viewed as an extension of Dallas. (Before you hurt me, please refer back to my previous statement about being wholly ignorant and for the love of god put the gun down.) But to my surprise, I discovered that I really enjoyed being here. The city seemed full of stories and complex histories that weren’t reducible to the “Cowtown” mythos that’s so often sold to outsiders (and so often accepted as fact by insiders).

I started writing Lost in Panther City mostly for myself: I wanted an excuse to continue learning about this place I called home. If anyone cared to read the scattershot products of my research, that was their business. And you managed to find your way here, despite my general disinclination to promote my own work — and for that, I am deeply grateful.

But I’ve decided it’s time to officially shut this thing down. Lost in Panther City has been on hiatus for many months, and I originally intended to bring it back when I could; this was always a passion project, and life and other projects got in the way. But I’m moving away from Fort Worth later this month, and now feels like a good time to put an end to things. The archives will remain up, but I won’t be posting anything new here.

That doesn’t mean I’m done writing. One of those aforementioned other projects has been building a new website, where I’m blogging regularly. If you want to keep following my work, I’ve set up an email newsletter for the stuff I post there. You can sign-up for that here, or just reply to this email and I’ll add you to the list. (I’m also on Bluesky, for whatever that’s worth.)

I haven’t ruled out the possibility that I’ll write about Fort Worth again in the future. For every post I actually published, there were at least five I didn’t. I just won’t be doing so for this newsletter. Lost in Panther City was a project that I genuinely loved and enjoyed writing, and I thought seriously about trying to continue it from afar. But ultimately, that didn’t feel right. It was something that anchored me to Fort Worth and, as such, it feels better to let it go.

Thanks to everyone who has read and shared and supported this newsletter over the years. It means a lot.