Autobiography

i am a poet, artist, potter and sculptor living on the coast of Maine.

As i see it in black and white, the statement feels blessedly surreal. My path began in a totally different trajectory. Until i reached my mid-twenties, i was determined to get a Ph.D. in history and work as a professor.

For many years, i struggled with the tension between what i thought i should do and an intense call to work as an artist and writer.  Even as i matriculated, i could not escape the impulse to make art. Poems sprang into being on the margins of my text books, sketches infiltrated my notes. For every major paper assigned for a class, i wrote a short story as a reward. Waiting for the metro provided enough time for a few lines of verse to form in my mind. Throughout college, graduate school, marriage and traditional jobs, creativity kept squirming out of the grasp of my responsibilities.

Eventually, illness and disability pushed me away from scholarship and regular nine-to-five employment and into the embrace of the arts. First, i threw myself head-long into writing poetry and fiction. Then i started to teach myself how to paint and sculpt. Once i got a bit better, i began to take pottery classes at Manassas Clay in Virginia. As my artistic range spread over new mediums, i celebrated the sense of wholeness that came to me when i let myself create.  Finally, i surrendered to this glorious compulsion.  Now, my days revolve around rendering the inspiration which bubbles forth from me into form - using word, pigment or clay. 

i am indescribably thankful that my work brings me such bliss.  Creativity - no matter what medium it demands in the moment - is as important to my being as oxygen.  i believe that we are imaginative, inventive beings to our core. To deny it would be folly.

all our lives,
we create art -
neither from the other
can ever be teased apart.

Being able to focus my days around the wheel, pen and brush makes me one of the luckiest people i know.