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ABOUT ME!!!
YAY!!!
ME in a NUTSHELL....
> 1968: born in Hannibal MO (don't remember much about it)
> 1973: moved 17mi up the Mississippi River to
Quincy IL, the place I consider my hometown...
> 1986: graduated from Quincy Senior High
> 1992: ..... bla bla bla, right? Not that I didn't have an interesting and fun childhood, but surely we can at least skip to after high school... It was the fall of '87 when I first went off to college at Western Illinois University and eventually graduated with a BS in Parks & Recreation.... Wait, Wait.., I already feel like I'm getting ahead of myself.... The summer after my freshman year, I got a job as a white-water guide in training on the Arkansas River in Colorado, an opportunity that changed my life. In the end, it led to about a decade of running rivers in summers, and ski-bumming in winters.... WOW!, what a fantastic lifestyle..... It took me to amazing places all over the country, and to some degree even internationally, and continues to inform the way I make decisions to this day...
(I still love to travel, run rivers, and ski:)
> 1997: Decided to take my art a little more seriously, and went back to art school at Montana State University in Bozeman, where there were still beautiful rivers and great skiing.... (I had a ski pass and a great personal art studio the majority of the time I was there :)
> 2002: Graduated with a BFA in sculpture, and, realizing there wasn't much opportunity for me in Montana given the kind of work I was doing, I decided to move to
Los Angeles. Again, WOW!... Although I'd already lived in a number of places by then, this was the first time I'd ever taken up residence in such a large city, and the culture shock was fantastic. Here, it seemed people from all over the world were a part of my everyday day life, and I loved it.... More specificly, I was in Santa Monica, which for a staving artist living in LA, was about the most perfect place I could have asked for... I spent copious amounts of time at the beach, and loved the virtually "no winter" climate....
However, even though I was always working odd jobs of one kind or another, it was often difficult to afford functional studio space, which made it very difficult to do the kind of work I like doing, namely, fairly large scale multi-media sculpture. So, given this supposed obstacle, (and this is an important point) I started writing to fill the creative void. I turned what could have been a negative into a positive and discovered something about myself I may have never known. I liked writing, and wrote a lot...
Also strangely relevant, one of the many possibly odd sounding jobs I had in California was working as an "Extra" in movies and TV shows. Between late '05, and probably early '09, I did it often actually, and can occasionally be seen walking by, sitting in a restaurant, gambling in a casino, as a patient in a hospital, or any other number of scenarios you might see in the background of your favorite shows and movies... It was a ton of fun, and oddly enough, it actually was relevant to my writing... There was always plenty of down time between scenes to get other work done, and writing just seemed to fit right in.....
>2010: Moved to Santa Fe NM, a fun funky town with a fantastic art scene. I lived in the best most functional full-time studio I'd had since living in Montana. I could basically make anything I wanted again. I could weld. I had my ceramics kiln up and running, not to mention all the other tools I have at my disposal. It was great!.... and lots of great work was done...
>2013 The big "FOLLIES OF A LAZY WRITER" book tour that went coast to coast, and was all kinds of fun... It was a good year otherwise too. <smile>
>2014 Moved to PORTAND, OR... and Love it!
