REQUEST FOR FEDERAL VIOLENT-CRIME INTAKE: GET THIS TO SPECIAL AGENT MERV MASON 2026

 

A Letter From the Amnesic Phoenix

Twenty Voices From My Archive and a Request to Help Send the Dead Home

BRIAN HAPPY BRYANSON   CPTSD COLD CASE

To Jeannette Walls, Tara Westover, Patrick Carnes, Adrienne Brodeur, Cheryl Diamond, and Fox Butterfield

Dear Ms. Walls, Ms. Westover, Dr. Carnes, Ms. Brodeur, Ms. Diamond, and Mr. Butterfield:

I am writing because each of you has explored survival, family secrecy, exploitation, poverty, trauma, moral injury, or the difficult construction of a life after childhood harm. I am asking you to meet me through the words and images I have preserved since memories began returning in 1997.

My name is Brian “Happy” Bryanson. I am a writer, former foster father, disability advocate, and former clinical social worker. I call my creative identity the Amnesic Phoenix. My archive contains poetry, short stories, journals, maps, victim-reference sheets, correspondence, and visual testimony. Its humanitarian purpose is Send the Dead Home.

The following twenty quotations are short doors into that archive. Between them I explain the story of how fragmented memory became service, writing, public witness, and a request for responsible help. Recollections and allegations in my archive are not established facts. They require independent corroboration.

MOVEMENT ONE

1997 TO 1999  MEMORY RETURNS

1	“Read my poetry and know the child I was before I became the man that I am.” The Amnesic Phoenix Poetic Dissertation

In 1997, while I was receiving services at the University of Texas at Arlington, abuse-related flashbacks began. I did not receive a continuous autobiography. I received images, physical reactions, sounds, smells, fragments, and emotion. Writing became the first place where the child I had been could speak to the adult I was becoming.

2	“our past never leaves us / its scars run deep” The Amnesic Phoenix

The flashbacks did not behave like an ordinary timeline. They returned through recurrence. The past entered the present, and the present had to find language strong enough to contain it. I need readers who understand that fragmented form can be part of the testimony rather than a reason to ridicule it.

3	“The child survives by dividing experience. The adult writer survives by giving the divisions a form.” The Amnesic Phoenix Poetic Dissertation

Forgetting helped me survive experiences my childhood mind could not integrate. Remembering in adulthood brought a different challenge: how to receive what surfaced without mistaking emotion for proof or uncertainty for failure. My mission requires both compassion for memory and discipline about what memory can establish.

4	“I was working hard to find my seat.” Flashback narrative preserved in The Ghosts’ Table

This sentence describes more than one remembered scene. It also describes my life. I struggled to find a place in school, in family, in my own body, and later within institutions that did not know what to do with difficult testimony. I am still trying to find a responsible seat at the table of discovery.

5	“I worked so hard, but nothing was said.” Hate My Poetry Hate My Life

By December 1999, I experienced the first recollection I understood as possibly involving a homicide. I began documenting and reporting. Silence from institutions did not make the burden disappear; it made me work harder. I need help turning decades of solitary effort into writing that other people can enter, question, and preserve.

MOVEMENT TWO

EDUCATION SERVICE AND CHOSEN IDENTITY

6	“A flower now grows, enriched by their fodder / Obtaining the title of Foster Father.” When You Look at Me What Do You See

I completed graduate study in social work while working full time in psychiatric and behavioral settings. I served as a psychiatric mental-health technician, a behavioral treatment coordinator for wards of the state, and a children’s coordinator in a recovery facility for women with children. Service became my counter-story to what I had survived.

7	“Treat as a hypothesis, not evidence.” Academic Appeal

Even while building a life of service, I learned to place careful boundaries around what memory alone can establish. I later worked as a clinical social worker, became a foster father, and operated an emergency shelter and assessment setting for children. Caregiving gave the past a direction—protect, nourish, listen—while this rule kept the mission accountable.

8	“Right now, I feel that warmth from her and how she radiated that kindness upon me.” Good Bye Skinny Red Head Girl

My short stories and journals do not contain only terror. They also preserve remembered kindness. Warmth matters because it explains what I tried to reproduce in my professional and family life. The archive needs literary guidance that can hold tenderness beside grief without using either one to sensationalize the other.

9	“yes, my Lil possum” Good Bye Skinny Red Head Girl

A remembered nickname became a vessel for attachment, grief, and belonging. Small phrases can carry entire relationships. I need writers who know how to protect these intimate details while shaping them into scenes a reader can understand, and who will help me distinguish memorial writing from claims requiring outside verification.

10	“I feel as if I am the luckiest person I know when it comes to surviving with love in my heart for others irregardless of the trauma I endured and had to overcome.” Good Bye Skinny Red Head Girl

The central fact of my identity is not only that I was injured. It is that love survived. That survival made possible a career of service and the role I call Foster Father to the Dead. I want this letter to show why my mission grows from care, not accusation or spectacle.

MOVEMENT THREE

2000 TO 2023  WRITING BECOMES AN ARCHIVE

11	“I feel like I let down the dead.” Hate My Poetry Hate My Life

For more than two decades I accumulated journals, poems, narratives, maps, location notes, victim-reference sheets, correspondence, and visual reconstructions. The fear of failing the dead became a powerful engine, but it also became a crushing private responsibility. I need help carrying the literary and archival work in a healthier, more accountable form.

12	“Once again when I put the images on paper and work out the sequence of events and share that story with the world, I am free.” Flashback journal preserved in The Ghosts’ Table

Writing often changed my bodily state. Images that arrived chaotically could be placed into sequence, dated, qualified, and revisited. The relief did not prove the historical content; it showed that language helped me process it. A skilled reader can help preserve this distinction while recognizing the human importance of the writing.

13	“I have been working on getting this flashback out since 5:00 am and it’s now 4:32pm and I am exhausted, but my psyche has been cleansed.” Flashback journal preserved in The Ghosts’ Table

The archive records the labor of remembering in real time. Many entries include time stamps, physical states, uncertainty, emerging imagery, and the relief or destabilization that followed. These features may matter to memoirists, trauma scholars, archivists, and clinicians even when a remembered event cannot yet be independently confirmed.

14	“As always know that your journey matters too and one day I hope to read your journey through your amnesic mind as you solve your own mysteries.” Will the Van Children Ever Be Found?

My writing reaches outward. I do not want the archive to remain a sealed account of one person’s suffering. I want it to help other people understand dissociation, nonlinear memory, moral injury, and the need for patient questions. Your guidance could help this invitation reach readers without losing its unusual voice.

15	“I know that I do not have all of my memories yet.” Good Bye Skinny Red Head Girl

This sentence is one of the archive’s necessary limits. The record is incomplete. Some details may change, contradict one another, or remain unresolved. I do not ask anyone to turn incompleteness into certainty. I ask for a structure that preserves dates, versions, corrections, and testable details so careful comparison remains possible.

MOVEMENT FOUR

2024 TO THE PRESENT  THE AMNESIC PHOENIX MISSION

16	“This was intended to be a Good Bye letter but as with most of my writings my flashbacks take over and these pages grow heavy with the memories of the past.” Good Bye Skinny Red Head Girl

The archive often changes form while I am writing. A farewell becomes a flashback record; a poem becomes a map; a journal becomes an appeal. I need an experienced collaborator who can respect that organic movement and still help me build a coherent book, sampler, and durable archival structure.

17	“I have carried these ghosts alone for a very long time.” The Ghosts’ Table

Disability and homebound limitations have made writing, email, and digital archiving essential. The work is now too large and morally important for me to carry alone. I need serious readers who can ask humane questions, identify responsible partners, and help the archive reach people equipped for literary, historical, and ethical review.

18	“These ghosts need a place at the table of discovery.” The Ghosts’ Table and Send the Dead Home archive

A place at the table does not mean automatic belief. It means that testimony is not discarded before anyone has separated memory, interpretation, documentary records, contradiction, corroboration, and verified fact. It means possible victims are treated with dignity and potentially testable details are not lost through neglect.

19	“My task is not to manufacture certainty. My task is to preserve testimony, invite verification, and refuse to let the nameless become invisible.” So There Will Be No Animosity in Heaven

This is the governing ethic of CPTSD Cold Case. My writings contain recollections and allegations, not judicial findings. I ask neither automatic belief nor automatic dismissal. I ask for disciplined curiosity, independent comparison, correction where needed, and protection against turning poetic truth into an unintended verdict.

20	“Compare the details. Follow the records. Send the dead home.” The Send the Dead Home mission

I need your help as writers and thinkers: read a limited sample, ask questions, advise how the work can become a poetic memoir or documentary literary project, and refer me to ethical editors, scholars, journalists, archives, or university programs. One responsible introduction could move this mission from solitary witness toward accountable review.

WHY I NEED YOUR HELP

I am not asking you to investigate allegations personally, endorse every recollection, or declare anyone guilty. I am asking you to help make this archive readable, durable, and capable of responsible review.

Please read a limited sample of my poems, journals, and short narratives. Tell me which voice is strongest, which scenes require more context, and which parts should be separated into poetry, memoir, documentary notes, or an archival appendix.

Please advise how this work could become a poetic memoir, documentary literary project, recorded performance, university archive, or trauma-studies resource without sacrificing uncertainty or the dignity of possible victims.

If the project lies outside your role, please refer me to a trauma-informed editor, memoirist, archivist, journalist, scholar, university center, literary nonprofit, or ethics-reviewed research team. I am disabled and substantially homebound; one careful introduction could matter enormously.

I have spent decades trying to carry these writings toward daylight. I need help ensuring that the work outlives me, that potentially testable details are preserved, and that no person described in a recollection is treated as proven guilty without evidence.

Find the missing. Find the families. Find the truth. Help send the lost home.

With respect,
Brian “Happy” Bryanson
The Amnesic Phoenix
Founder and Archive Publisher  CPTSD Cold Case
Foster Father to the Dead
CPTSDcoldcase@gmail.com
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