B i o g r a p h y
I grew up in rural Virginia, in an area about 30 miles north of Richmond. I attribute a lot of things about myself to my rural childhood. The lack of television or other children to play with, being left alone with my imagination, the reasonable expectation that nothing was going to happen for a long time...
From an early age, I started writing poems. There was this stream of words going all the time, frequently in cadence, and if I listened to it, I could write down what it said. A lot of it was nonsense, even meaningless to me as the writer, but who is to say what a few careless words might mean to someone else? That is the beauty of art. It exists independently of its creator, causing this feeling or that one, totally free and unconstrained by the artist's intention.
I received my B.A. in English from the College of Charleston, SC, focusing in Creative Writing of poetry. These studies were not centered on form, rhyme, and meter, but rather on methods of experimentation and on writing meaningfully, even in free verse. This time was very significant for me, as I learned to abandon intention and look at art as something that can stand alone, separate from the artist.
After college, I worked in a number of different jobs including but not limited to childcare, law, education, hospitality, real estate, freelance PR and journalism, and at times, manual labor. During this time I was also doing everything I could to work as a professional musician. I did make money playing music, but it was not much, and I finally became convinced that a career as a musician would be a difficult and unreliable path. My pursuit of rock stardom took me from my home in Virginia, to NYC, to Nashville, to Hamburg, Germany. I saw a lot during this wandering period, and I saw a lot of struggling musicians in particular, which also contributed to my decision to return to school. In Nashville, there are guitar players who have faster reflexes and can be more inventive than Clapton or Hendrix, and they live off of tip wages and pay from the occasional studio session.
So, I set out to study Communication with the ultimate goal of efficiently promoting my own music online, through networks, and however else possible. In the five years since my graduation from college, I had repeatedly found myself at a dead end, lacking a useful network and professional, non-freelance experience in my field of study. I came to school largely to build a network, and I feel I have been successful in doing that thus far.
Playing and writing music will always be one of the most meaningful things in my life. I will continue working professionally as a musician wherever I can because it is honest work, and I will of course always play for pleasure. However, returning to the academic world and truly enjoying research and learning has given me comfort that I am still capable of learning completely unfamiliar skills and concepts and even of coming to understand everything in the world in a new way. The last time I felt that was when I studied Eastern philosophy in college.
People have said, and I was afraid, that the human brain stops growing and developing in significant ways around age 25. That is not true. My theory is that age 25 is a time in many peoples' lives at which they set their minds on a career and incidentally become channelled into thinking mostly or even exclusively in ways relevant to their careers. If we challenge our minds though, perhaps by learning new languages, taking up a new instrument, practicing complex math in our heads, or even pushing ourselves to see from another person's perspective, our brains can grow until the body withers away.