AUGUST WILDER JOHNSON
PIECES ON THE FLOOR.
A Memoir of Mentorship, Murder,
and a Missing Mijo
About
AUGUST
August Wilder Johnson writes memoir-driven narratives about love, danger, fatherhood, and the thin spaces where meaning slips in. His work explores the emotional aftermath of raising a child who wasn’t his by blood but became his son in every way that mattered — until the world rewrote their story.
His serialized memoir, Pieces on the Floor, unfolds in fragments: domestic quiet broken by rupture, courtrooms that double as battlegrounds, systems that fail boys long before they learn to speak their fear aloud, and the long echoes of a son who once called him Dad. August’s writing blends emotional clarity with spiritual questioning, drawing on years of caregiving, grief, and reckoning.
He publishes new essays regularly on Medium, where his work has been featured in major publications, including Human Parts, known for intimate personal storytelling.
August writes under a pseudonym to honor the privacy of the families and young people at the center of his work — but the emotions, the relationships, and the search for meaning are entirely his own.
When he’s not writing, he can often be found having long conversations with friends, sitting in quiet rooms petting his dogs or cat, wandering trails with a reflective heart, or noticing the small domestic details that hold whole stories inside them.
read pieces on the floor
I publish every installment of my memoir on Medium, where readers can follow along as the story unfolds in real time. If you’d like to read from the beginning, explore the latest chapter, or follow the series as it continues, you’ll find everything here:
Read on Medium: https://medium.com/@augustwilderjohnson
Follow me for new installments: https://medium.com/@augustwilderjohnson
Medium is where the memoir lives — where new chapters appear, where readers highlight the lines that resonate, and where the full emotional arc is unfolding one fragment at a time.
If you’re new to the story, you can begin here:
Brief explanation of the 16 fragment installments.
1 — The Week My Son Disappeared, and No One Saw Who He Really Was [Published in Human Parts on Medium 11/26/2025]
2 — The Day an Entire School Walked Out and Turned my Son Into a Threat [Published in Human Parts on Medium 12/1/2025]
3 — When Fatherhood Shows Up Uninvited
4 — A Boy’s Poem About a Man Who Saved Him
5 — The Holy Interruptions That Saved My Sanity
6 — My Friend Burned Down a Library. He Also Saved Me.
7 — The First Girl I Kissed Became a Federal Defendant
8 — The Week My Son Disappeared — and the School Looked Away
9 — The Woman Who Stole My Trust and Pulled Me Into a Crime
10 — The Boy I Raised and the Ghosts He Carried
11 — Homeschooling a Boy the System Never Understood
12 — How Dog Man and One Woman Saved a Boy’s Childhood
13 — The Small Joys That Saved Us
14 — The Last Lesson My Father Ever Taught Me
15 — The Day My Son Brought Something Dangerous to School
16 — The Cost of Loving a Child Who Breaks
As the memoir grows, each chapter link will be added here so you can always return to the beginning, reread what you’ve missed, or continue from wherever you left off.