AUGUST WILDER JOHNSON
PIECES ON THE FLOOR:
The True Story 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, The Bigger Picture, and Pen with Paper, 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 life — but the emotions, the relationships, and the search for meaning are entirely real.
When he’s not writing, he can often be found having long conversations with friends, sitting in quiet rooms petting Turbo the cat, wandering trails with a reflective heart, or wrestling with the words to describe life’s most recent turn of events.
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. Come back to the hyperlinks below to read each piece for free if you are not a Medium member.
Brief explanation of the 14 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 — How Fatherhood Ambushed Me at 47 [Published in Human Parts on Medium 12/17/2025]
4 — My Best Friend Burned Down a Library. [Published on Medium 12/24/2025].
5 — The First Girl Who Kissed Me Became a Federal Defendant [Published in Illumination on Medium 1/8/2026]
6 - The Questions that Followed Me in 2025 [Published 1/10/26 in The Bigger Picture on Medium]
7 - The Woman Who Stole My Trust and Pulled Me Into a Crime
[Published in Pen With Paper on Medium, 1/28/2026]
8- The Boy I Raised and the Ghosts He Carried [Published 2/5/26 in Illumination on Medium]
9-How The Comment Section Became Another Crime Scene: Grief is private until the internet decides it isn’t. [Published 2/11/2026 in Pen With Paper on Medium]
10-Homeschooling a Boy the System Never Understood
11— How Dog Man and One Woman Saved a Boy’s Childhood
12-The Small Joys That Saved Us
13-The Last Lesson My Father Ever Taught Me
14- The Day My Son Brought Something Dangerous to School
15- 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.