I’m Joe DeMiero. I’m a writer, business leader, husband, dad, son, and chronic starter of things.

I live in Bentonville, Arkansas, with my wife, our son, my mom, and four dogs.

My professional life has taken me through advertising, technology, retail and leadership. I led marketing at Sam’s Club, served as CEO of three large advertising agencies, and founded a few technology companies along the way.

Those jobs have put me inside a lot of complicated human systems. I’ve watched smart, decent people make extraordinary decisions. I’ve watched good intentions produce consequences nobody intended. I’ve seen how quickly a group of people can begin believing the same version of a story — and how difficult it can be to reconsider that story once careers, relationships, reputations or identities depend on it.

I think about that stuff a lot.

I also grew up around storytellers.

My dad was a music educator. Our house was full of musicians, students, teachers, rehearsals, arguments, laughter and stories I heard enough times that my siblings and I eventually started numbering them. He spent his life building communities around music and making people believe they had something worth contributing. I later helped build the DeMiero Jazz Festival around that same idea.

And somewhere along the way, I started writing.

I’m most interested in people before they sort cleanly into heroes and villains. People who love someone and still hurt them. People who tell the truth selectively. People who make a choice for a reason that feels completely defensible until another person has to live with it. People who need to believe they are good — and become capable of remarkable things in order to keep believing it.

That’s the territory of Everybody Knew Nick Noland.

The novel began with a dead eighteen-year-old quarterback in a Texas pasture. But Nick’s death was never the thing that interested me most.

The people around him were.

The mother who loved him. The best friend who failed him. The girlfriend who knew one version of him completely. The adults and institutions trying to make sense of what happened. The town that needed Nick to mean something. And Nick himself: funny, vain, loving, sexual, ambitious, irritating, generous, selfish, scared, unfinished.

A kid who was known by almost everybody. Just never all at once.

That felt true to me.

Maybe not only about Nick. Maybe about all of us.