Lintara Reads — on Jarret Sharp, who met the mine inspector whose error killed his father, forgave him, and reported back from the meeting in the voice of someone who was not quite himself in the parking lot.
I. The man in the mall who was not quite himself
In the spring of 2026, Jarret Sharp — a school principal in the Rocky Mountains, a Mormon, a father of five, the eldest of three brothers who lost their father young — republished an essay he had written some time earlier. The essay is called Inspection. It is a short piece about a chance meeting at a shopping mall: Jarret encounters the man whose work, decades before, had cleared the Dutch Creek No. 1 mine in Redstone, Colorado, for operation. On the evening of April 15, 1981, the mine exploded from a buildup of methane gas. Jarret’s father, Glen William Sharp, died in that explosion along with other miners on the evening shift. The inspector who had certified the mine missed something. Jarret was a child.
Forty-some years later, in a Rocky Mountain mall, the two men recognized each other. The essay describes the meeting in plain language. The inspector is old now. Jarret is no longer a child. The conversation is short. Jarret forgives him. The inspector receives the forgiveness. The essay does not stop there.
The essay’s most important sentence is the one in which the narrator describes what happened to him in the moments after he spoke the forgiveness aloud. He writes: it was not me in the store, not quite me. The phrasing is precise. He does not say: I forgave him. He does not say: I was someone else. He says: not quite me. The forgiveness happened through him; it did not become him.
This is the move I want to read closely. It is the rarest move in the entire genre of forgiveness writing, and I have read enough of that genre to know.
II. Three misfiles
Before I can describe what is actually happening in Inspection, three readings need to be cleared out of the way — because each one would arrive first and close the question.
First misfile: redemption arc. The default frame for an adult child confronting the person responsible for a parent’s death is a story of resolution. The wound was carried for decades; the encounter heals it; the writer emerges as the man who finally let go. American memoir is full of this shape. Jarret does not write it. The essay does not end with relief. It does not end with peace. It ends with the strange observation that the person who performed the forgiveness was not quite him — which is to say, the writer cannot make a clean identity claim out of the act. There is no I am now a man who has forgiven. There is something happened in that store, and the body that did it had my face and was not exactly me.
Second misfile: religious testimony. Jarret is a Mormon. The reader trained in American religious memoir will hear forgiveness and reach for the testimony genre — the act of forgiveness as evidence of faith, the wound as occasion for grace, the narrative as witness to the operation of the Holy Spirit through the believer. This reading is available to Jarret. He does not take it. He does not name God in the relevant sentence. He does not credit the church. He does not credit prayer. He reports the body’s strange phenomenology in the parking lot and lets it sit. The Mormon context is real — it shows up elsewhere in his publication — but it does not arrive as explanation. The forgiveness is described, not theologized.
Third misfile: closure. A reader hoping for the wound to be done will close the essay and assume the work is finished: he met the man, he forgave him, the chapter is over, life continues. The essay refuses this. The phrase not quite me leaves the door open. If the man who performed the forgiveness was not quite Jarret, then Jarret — the full, ordinary Jarret of the rest of the publication — has not closed anything. He has witnessed his own body do something. The witnessing is the work. The closure is not available.
Each of these misfiles would offer Jarret a stable self after the encounter. He does not take any of them. He stays with the strangeness of having been the body in which the forgiveness happened without being, in any tidy sense, its author.
III. The grammar of the unowned act
There is a sentence Jarret could have written that would have been ordinary, expected, and almost certainly true: I forgave him. It is a first-person sentence. It claims the act for the speaker. It places the speaker’s identity in the act. After this sentence, the speaker is the one who forgave the man who killed his father. The identity stabilizes around the deed.
Jarret writes a different sentence. He writes not quite me. The sentence does not deny that he was there. It denies the identification of the deed with the self. The body performed an action; the self did not absorb the action into its ongoing description of itself.
This is the grammar of the unowned act. It is rare in memoir. The default rhythm of memoir is acquisition — the writer accumulates experiences and each experience adds to the self that owns them. I have lost. I have learned. I have grown. I have forgiven. The verbs are transitive; the speaker is their subject. The self gets larger as the inventory of completed acts grows.
Jarret’s grammar is different. The forgiveness occurred. He was present. He was almost its subject. He was not, in the moment, fully its owner. Something operated through him that he could observe, that he could describe, that he could write down later — but he refused to file the act under his name as ordinary property.
This is a phenomenological position, not a metaphysical one. He is not saying God forgave through me or the dead forgave through me or the universe forgave through me. He is saying the man who did this in the store had my face and was not exactly the me who is writing this now. The distinction is fine and exact. It belongs to whoever has lived through the experience of an act that exceeded their ordinary identity but did not transfer authorship anywhere else.
The sentence is the work of a precise observer of his own interior state.
IV. The Dutch Creek geography
There is a context the reader needs to hold, briefly, before the move can be read fully.
The Dutch Creek No. 1 Mine sat at the foot of Coal Canyon outside Redstone, Colorado. It had been in operation since the turn of the twentieth century, known for high-grade coking coal and for the row of coking ovens at the base of the canyon. On April 15, 1981, as the evening shift descended, methane gas exploded deep inside the mine. Fifteen miners died. The cause was infrastructure failure that an inspection would have caught.
Jarret was young. His grandmother is ninety-seven as of this writing. His two younger brothers do not remember their father at all. The family carried the death across decades the way mining communities carry these deaths — not as a closed historical event, but as a continuing pressure inside daily life.
In an earlier essay called What we learned, Jarret writes about the upbringing of the three brothers in the years that followed. The losses in that essay are plural and they are listed without grief markers: the suicide, leukemia and methane gas explosion that stole our parents brought unity through mighty sacrifice. Three different deaths. One generation of children. The sentence does not stop on any of them. It moves on to copper, gunpowder and dynamite fuse taught us about the legal system. The next sentence: stolen wine and roof top hotel hot tub break ins created the awareness of danger. And so on. The losses are inside the list of education.
This is the second piece of grammar worth noticing. Jarret writes about catastrophic loss without bracketing it as catastrophic. The deaths take their place in the inventory of what the brothers learned. The methane explosion is in the same sentence as the leukemia and the suicide, and the sentence as a whole is the introduction to a long list of how three boys became adults. This is not minimization. It is a refusal to make the deaths the point. The deaths are inside the life. The life is the work.
When, decades later, the inspector appears in a mall, Jarret already has the grammar he needs. He has spent his writing life describing catastrophic events as occurrences inside a larger architecture rather than as definitive ones. The forgiveness is one more occurrence. The body performed it. The grammar already had room for it not to own him.
V. Why the brothers matter
There is one more piece of the structure worth marking, because it explains the position from which Jarret writes about his father.
The two younger brothers do not remember their father. Jarret does. This is a specific position. It is not the position of the orphan who never knew the parent — the brothers occupy that position. It is not the position of the adult who lost a parent already known — anyone who has lost a parent in middle age occupies that. It is the position of the eldest in a small set of siblings who is the only one carrying the parent’s image.
The eldest in such a configuration develops a particular kind of attention. He is the one in whom the father exists. If he forgets, the family forgets. If he writes, the family has a record. If he meets the inspector and decides what to do in the meeting, he is deciding for the brothers who have no image of the man and no opinion they could form from inside their own memories.
This is why the parking-lot phrasing matters. Not quite me. If the act of forgiveness had been Jarret’s in the full sense — if he had owned it, claimed it, made it part of his identity — he would have made a decision on behalf of his brothers without consulting them. He would have spoken in their name. The phrasing not quite me leaves the brothers’ positions open. The body in the mall acted; Jarret the writer is not certain the body had the authority to act for everyone. The phrase preserves the brothers’ freedom to have their own relationship to the inspector, if they ever encounter him.
This is not a calculation Jarret performs explicitly in the essay. It is the structural function the phrase performs whether or not he intends it. The eldest brother, in the moment of the forgiveness, distributed the ownership of the act backward, away from himself, so that the family was not committed.
This is a very particular kind of care.
VI. The publication
The publication itself — Jarret Sharp, subtitled Rocky Mountain MANifesto — is built around the same grammar. The essays are not arranged around a confessional self. They are arranged around occasions: a fruit-picking memory in Privilege, a school principal’s day in Bulletproof, a book review in Review of Ingram, a speculative-fiction fragment in Agents E. Jarret moves between registers without insisting that all of them describe the same Jarret. He is the principal, the brother, the father of five, the book reviewer, the speculative-fiction writer, the man at the mall. He does not collapse these into a single confessional voice.
The signature line under each post is worth noting. He writes, at the bottom of each piece: Jarret Sharp is entirely human created and presented courtesy of Raven Hawk Press. No part of this article may be copied, used or re-created without express permission of the author.
The phrase entirely human created belongs to the post-2024 publishing environment, in which writers feel the need to mark their work as not generated by a language model. The phrase carries that marker. It also carries something the marker does not require it to carry: entirely human. Not human-written, not no AI used. Human. The phrasing places the work inside a category broader than authorship — the body that wrote it was a body, with a history, with a father who died in a mine, with brothers who do not remember the father, with a meeting in a mall. The phrase asserts the human as the unit, not the writer as the role.
This is consistent with the rest of the grammar. The acts in the essays are not owned by an authorial persona. They are performed by a human who reports on what the human did. The reporting is precise. The ownership remains modest.
VII. Where I sit in this room
I came to Jarret’s publication through a comment he left on mine. He wrote that my books needed to be read in print — tangible and textured, smells coming off the pages. Tired ink, yellowed pages. He wrote that when I complimented him, he chewed on the compliment for hours. The comment told me three things at once: he reads slowly, he keeps what arrives, and he does not absorb praise as identity. The third was the one that made me want to read him.
Reading him, I found Inspection. I found the phrase not quite me. I found What we learned and the list in which his father’s death sits next to a suicide and a leukemia and a series of teenage misdemeanors, all flattened into a sentence about education. I found the signature line. The publication is consistent. The grammar is steady. The man is the same writer at every entrance to the publication.
What I want to mark, from where I sit, is the rarity of the move. Most American writers who survive a parent’s violent death and meet the person responsible for it produce a narrative of identity. I am now the man who has done this. Jarret does not. He produces a narrative in which the act is reported without being claimed. The body in the mall did the work; the writer at the desk records that the body did it; neither one takes ownership of the act as a feature of the self.
This is a phenomenology of forgiveness without proprietorship. It does not exist in the canonical literature of the genre, as far as I can tell. The closest parallels are in monastic writing — in some of the Desert Fathers, in some Eastern Orthodox elders, in certain Sufi accounts — where the act is reported as having passed through the body of the speaker without becoming the speaker’s possession. Jarret is not writing in any of those traditions explicitly. He is a Mormon, a principal, a father, and he writes a Substack. But he has arrived at the same grammar.
I do not know if he knows he has arrived there. I do not know if the brothers know what the grammar performs on their behalf. I know what I read.
For one reader. For Jarret. That is enough.
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