Field Reports From The Home Front
Marriage is a negotiation. So is the dishwasher.
Casey Hawke writes dispatches from the border war of domestic life — where socks go missing, thermostats start wars, and every load of laundry deserves its own accord. Author of three books, starting with How to Load the Dishwasher (and Other Domestic Peace Treaties).
About the Negotiator
Casey Hawke
Casey Hawke has never won an argument about the correct way to load a dishwasher, and has instead settled for writing 200 pages about it. Under this name, Casey chronicles the small, absurd treaties that keep a household from open warfare: who owns the good pillow, what counts as "cleaning," and whether a fitted sheet can, in fact, be folded by a person with dignity intact.
The dispatches are collected in the debut book How to Load the Dishwasher (and Other Domestic Peace Treaties) — part memoir, part mediation transcript, part cry for help. Casey lives with the co-signatories to most of these treaties and remains, technically, on speaking terms with all of them.
"I didn't set out to write a book. I set out to win one argument about bowls. This is the transcript."
— Casey Hawke
The Treaty
How to Load the Dishwasher
(and Other Domestic Peace Treaties) — out now in paperback and on Kindle.
Every couple has a border dispute. Maybe it's the thermostat. Maybe it's whose turn it is to deal with the mystery Tupperware. In How to Load the Dishwasher, Casey Hawke treats every domestic skirmish with the gravity of an international summit — because, frankly, that's what it deserves.
Across two dozen short, sharp essays, Hawke drafts formal treaties for the wars nobody warns you about: the Sock Accords, the Great Thermostat Ceasefire, the Fitted Sheet Non-Aggression Pact. It's a book for anyone who has ever loved someone enough to fight about a spoon.
Funny, specific, and a little too accurate — read it out loud to your household. They'll recognize themselves. Possibly with objections.
Both formats are available from the same Amazon listing — choose your format on the product page.
Also By Casey Hawke
A Second Collection
A second collection, for readers who finished the first one and came back for more.
The Journal of Minor Grievances
A Field Guide to Problems That Don't Matter, Studied As If They Did
Sixty mock-academic field studies into the small, ridiculous frustrations of everyday life — the short checkout line that's somehow the slowest, the socks that vanish mid-wash, the elevator button that may or may not do anything. Footnoted, illustrated, and taken far more seriously than it deserves.
A Departure
Big G's
Casey Hawke's first novel — same porch-light warmth, a longer story to tell.
The Door's Not Going to Bite You
There's only one place in Suwanahatchee County to burn a cigar properly, and Big G's had been open thirty-some years before Cranleigh ever wandered through its door. He wasn't looking for much that October evening — just somewhere to sit while he figured out what comes after twenty-four years in the Army, fifteen more in a corporate office, and a layoff he never saw coming.
What he found instead was a bottle club full of regulars with a story for every occasion: a deputy who still can't forget one particular turkey, a charter captain whose fish keep growing in the retelling, a lifelong local who owns a Mexican condo on nothing but a handshake, and a bar owner who reads every stranger who walks through his door in under ninety seconds flat.
Over the course of one unpredictable year — Thanksgiving, a courthouse zoning fight, hurricane season nerves, and his own daughter's wedding — Cranleigh discovers that a man doesn't get his life handed back to him all at once. It comes in pieces: a bar door that doesn't bite, a fence post finally set right, and a room full of near-strangers willing to stand up for him when it counts.
Big G's is a warm, funny, tall-tale-soaked novel about the kind of belonging you don't go looking for — it finds you, one ordinary Tuesday at a time.
A New Series
The Wrenford Mysteries
The Wrenford Mysteries follow Grace Calloway, a former big-city journalist who came home to Wrenford, Virginia, to run the town's last surviving newspaper — and keeps finding herself in the middle of the town's hardest stories. Each book is a self-contained, fair-play mystery with real stakes, warm and specific small-town atmosphere, and a slow-building clean romance with the town's widowed sheriff. Faith runs quietly through every book — not as a lecture, but as how these characters actually try to live. Start anywhere. Stay for the whole town.
"She came home to run a newspaper. She didn't expect to solve a murder."
Grace Calloway left Wrenford at eighteen and swore she'd never look back — until a failed marriage brought her home to run her father's paper. When Founders' Day ends with a body at the base of the old mill wheel, she can't leave it alone, no matter how many times Sheriff Nate Reyes tells her to stay behind the tape. Book 1 of a small-town, faith-woven mystery series about second chances and the grace you can't earn.
"Some floods carry more than water away."
Fifty-eight years after a flood took four lives, erosion at Riverside Park uncovers a fifth — one that didn't drown by accident. Grace and Sheriff Nate Reyes untangle an old affair, a buried safety violation, and her own late father's handwriting, proof he asked these same questions once and chose silence himself. Can be read as a standalone, though longtime readers will recognize familiar faces.
When the Harvest Festival's biggest headline turns into its first homicide, Grace has to find the truth — without losing the town she came home to save.
A visiting food critic doesn't leave the Harvest Festival alive, and the evidence turns toward a woman no one wants it to be. As rumor moves faster than fact, Grace learns that real mercy was never about softening the truth — it's about telling it carefully, and staying in the room while it costs someone everything.
"It wasn't a break-in. Somebody let themselves in."
Twelve days before Christmas Eve, Wrenford's beloved church treasurer is found dead inside First Shepherd Community Church, and the town would rather blame a passing stranger than look at its own pews. Grace can't stop seeing what doesn't fit: the broken glass is on the wrong side of the door, and the cash box is gone but the valuables aren't. With the council ready to cancel the Christmas Eve service, she and Sheriff Nate Reyes must find a killer hidden among people they love before the candles are lit.
"The lanterns were lit for a celebration. By morning, one of them marked where she fell."
Spring has come early to Wrenford, and for the first time anyone can remember, the Dogwood Blossom Walk will end inside the Whitfield gates. Then Grace Calloway finds Iris Yancey, the town's no-nonsense librarian, among her own paper lanterns, struck by a car that never slowed, her canvas bag gone. When the case turns toward the people Grace is quietly protecting, she has to ask whether her silence is mercy, or the same habit that has let Wrenford keep its worst secret for thirty years.
Books 1 through 5 are out now. Five more Wrenford Mysteries are planned.
A Sample Treaty
Read One For Free
Not from the book — a standalone treaty, written for this website, in the same spirit as the collection.
Article XII: On the Vertical Alignment of Bowls
Ratified between two parties who agreed to disagree, loudly, near the sink.
- Whereas Party A holds that bowls belong in the bottom rack, angled toward the sprayer, and whereas Party B holds that bowls belong wherever there is room, the parties acknowledge that both positions cannot be correct, and also that neither party will change their mind.
- Party A shall be permitted to re-arrange the rack after Party B has loaded it, so long as this is done silently, and never in front of Party B.
- Party B shall be permitted to notice the rearranging, and to say nothing, for up to three days, before bringing it up during an unrelated conversation about something else entirely.
- The parties agree that the true dispute was never about bowls.
Filed and witnessed, Casey Hawke
Diplomatic Corps
Get new treaties by email
Occasional dispatches when a new essay or treaty goes up. No spam, no chore charts, no negotiating tactics used against you personally.
Correspondence
Get in touch
Questions, event invitations, or your own domestic dispute that needs a ruling — reach Casey directly.
casey@caseyhawke.com