“My medium kind of fluctuates depending on my mood. I guess I’m typically known as a writer if I am known at all. As a creative person, I feel compelled to work that out just constantly, whatever I’m doing.
I don’t play video games. I don’t work well within some sort of realm that someone else has created. I don’t like to manipulate; I like to create. Oftentimes that’s with words, with poetry, but also with music. I’m just kind of obsessed with sound, but that kind of depends on what I’m feeling at the time, too. I really love visual art as well. I’m not as talented in that area, but I do like to mess around with it. Whether or not anyone sees what I do is not nearly as important as just me doing something.
I teach at Goshen High School. This year is a bit different than normal because of the pandemic, so right now I’m actually one of the online teachers. Under normal circumstances, I teach literature, composition, and rhetoric, mostly to high school seniors going into college. I teach both college prep courses and also actual college courses through Indiana University. I love working with people at that age, right as they’re on the cusp of getting out into their own and really discovering who they are and how they function, especially as learners.
Starting at about the time I was 15 up until I was in my early 30s, I spent a lot of time onstage in lots of different bands, traveling all over doing that kind of thing. Those were wonderful moments. To have everything come together where it seems as though everybody in the room – regardless of whether they’re on the stage or not – is participating. Everybody is somehow contributing to that moment. I don’t know what you would want to call it. ‘Shared autonomy,’ maybe? Like you’re all just working as one unit. Everybody has a role, even if you can’t articulate what it is. I absolutely love those moments.
If you never make it out of this area, it may be easy to think that what we have here isn’t anything unusual or special. When I look at the people with whom I’ve come in contact, going back as far as far as elementary school, it’s amazing to me how many people I know who have made their lives focused around art – some of them even make money off of it! I look at the quality of the work, the products that artists around here make. So much of it is incredibly impressive. I’m sure there are other things in other places going on like that, but I think it is unusual to find a city that is as small as what we have that still has such a thriving community of people who care about art, who value it, who recognize it as an essential part of life.”
