“Clayton” is an excerpt from Shelter: the Architecture of Our Days, Stokley Towles’s unpublished manuscript. For 25 years, Towles has immersed himself in overlooked urban communities—sewer workers, city bus drivers, garbage collectors—and interviewed the people he met along the way, bringing his insights to life with stories and images. He has published in ZYZZYVA, Harness, and Raven Chronicles Journal. He has performed on a city bus, in a room he built in a library and in theaters, bookstores and nightclubs in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. His work has been presented at the Henry Art Gallery, Greg Kucera Gallery, and Seattle Art Museum. Towles’s last project followed construction workers in Calgary, Alberta. He lives with his wife in Seattle.