NAMELESS COWFISH:
THE YEARS BETWEEN THE STATIONS

Nameless Cowfish: The Years Between The Stations is a work of literary fiction by David Kitzmiller following Jade, a young man from Sheridan, Indiana, searching for where he belongs. With a passion for writing but no clear outlet for it, he turns to music, building a garage band from borrowed instruments and uncertain ambition. What begins as an escape gradually becomes something larger, carrying him through decades shaped by friendship, family, heartbreak, modest success, and the difficult choices that follow a life devoted to creating.

Spanning more than thirty years across the small towns and cornfields of the American Midwest, the novel traces several forms of love: loyalty between friends, complicated family ties, the pull of music, and Jade’s evolving connection with Christine, a relationship marked as much by timing and silence as affection. Along the way come wrong turns, unexpected humor, losses that linger, and moments capable of altering a life long after they pass.

More than a story about chasing dreams, Nameless Cowfish: The Years Between The Stations explores identity, connection, and the realization that what ultimately shapes us is often different from what we believed we were searching for.

About the NOVEL

Across garages, bars, back roads, rehearsals, breakups, and years that seem to accelerate without warning, Jade learns that becoming the person he imagined is rarely straightforward. Success arrives unevenly. Friendships deepen and fracture. Love changes shape. The things meant to save us sometimes become the things we leave behind.

Nameless Cowfish: The Years Between The Stations moves through moments of humor, disappointment, devotion, addiction, recovery, and quiet reinvention without losing sight of hope. The novel lingers in ordinary places and small decisions, tracing how lives are built over time rather than singular turning points.

At its center is a question carried through music, family, friendship, and romance: What remains when the life we planned gives way to the life we actually have? Through Jade’s search for direction, Kitzmiller explores the distance between ambition and contentment, and the unexpected ways people become anchors for one another.

Style

Kitzmiller's literary fiction moves differently from his memoir. Where the memoirs are immediate and unguarded, the novel has the patience of someone who has had time to understand what he is describing. The same emotional honesty is present, but the form allows for distance, structure, and the particular kind of truth that only becomes visible across thirty years rather than ten days. Readers of the memoir and poetry series will recognize the voice. The novel gives it room to breathe in ways the other forms cannot.

Related Works

Two songs in Kitzmiller's music catalog connect directly to this novel. Broken, Track 2 on Burnt Songs from the Toaster Vol. I, is written into the Nameless Cowfish storyline. Smokes, Track 5 on She Sings Songs from the Toaster: The Bedroom Session, is subtitled The Nameless Cowfish Tribute. For the years this novel fictionalizes told through memoir, Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom traces the same period from the inside.

Purchase Nameless Cowfish:
The Years Between The Stations