About

Enter Silence & Substance

Perspective quietly shaped by liminality and the emotional detritus of being human.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that truth is not revealed but "brushed against the grain" of everyday life—discovered in the fragments others overlook. He believed that redemption comes not from above, but from our human attention to what's already vanishing.

That's where Silence & Substance lives: collecting fragments in the present.

I write from what I call The In-between—those liminal spaces where privilege reveals itself as temporary, where presence proves optional, where a dropped video call can expose the contingency of everything we thought was ours. Like Benjamin’s ragpicker, I collect these fleeting, inconspicuous moments—gathering what others discard.

This is lo-fi literature and philosophy for an age of fracture. Part essay, part diary—notes from the psycho-emotional territory of the culturally dispossessed and systemically alienated. Not grand narratives but small recognitions: how we exist within circumstances that shape but never fully determine us, and how we keep choosing even when nothing is guaranteed.

Benjamin understood that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. In that spirit, these pieces document both the quiet violence of exclusion and the strange beauty of impermanence. They're written for anyone who understands that paying attention is its own kind of devotion—not to anything grand, just to what's slipping away while we're not looking.

Yoshida Kenkō (吉田兼好) wrote that the beauty of life lies in its very uncertainty. Consider this my invitation to that ongoing recognition—one observation at a time, from what others may never notice.

In an age that demands we look away, attention isn't futile. It's resistance.

About Me

Writing begins when silence no longer holds what needs saying. Quiet words waft by until they ask to be written. That is enough.

Writing has been my quiet anchor for as long as I can remember, though it wasn't until later in life that I understood what it truly meant to me. Over time, writing became more than expression—it became a form of stillness, a way to slow down and sit with the silences we tend to ignore.

I began capturing these moments in fragments and reflections, blending lived experience with fiction to explore the unseen. Once I found that space—the interior world where memory, absence, and imagination converge—there was no turning back.

I write from the silent, in-between spaces of life.

My work lives at the intersection of narrative inquiry and existential reflection. Rooted in personal experience and shaped by a lifetime of cultural and emotional liminality, I write to uncover what often goes unnoticed: the subtle griefs, fractured identities, and half-remembered truths that shape who we are.

Born between Japan and the United States, I belong fully to neither—a cultural dispossession that shapes how I see and write about the world. This multiplicity gives form to my prose and to the emotional structures I explore.

In my writing, absence is not a void but a texture. Silence is not emptiness but presence.

I write literary fiction, personal essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry—but at the core of it all lies what I call memoir fiction: stories drawn from life, reshaped through imagination, and rendered with emotional precision.

This approach has led me to what I refer to as Quiet Realism, which resists spectacle. It favors restraint over exposition, subtext over resolution. These are works composed in minor keys—minimalist, elliptical, and emotionally resonant. I try to write as one listens: slowly, attentively, and with reverence for what cannot be easily explained.

I lead a somewhat enigmatic and reclusive life, currently living in relative seclusion, dividing my time between writing, reading, and moving—geographically and emotionally—through the shifting landscapes that continue to shape my perspective.

Thank you for being here.

— Dean Bowman