The first ten years of my work life, I taught writing and taught teachers how to teach writing. I moved from New York City to Provincetown, MA, where I was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. In winter, I followed deer paths through the woods to the sea; trespassed the property lines of summer houses tethered to the National Seashore, paralleling one purpose of a writer’s imagination: to thwart borders, using language as the medium. The land, its contradictions, its uncanny light reminded me of Kenya, where I’d been a Peace Corps Volunteer, another border crossing. 

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I wanted to stay in Provincetown, so I worked in a shop for the summer season. Retail in the summer, writing and teaching in the winter. Between that time: A Mass Artists Fellowship and a second fellowship at the Work Center.

 

An unexpected career as a retail entrepreneur led to an unexpected career at a fashion company back in New York City. Poets are natural strategists, pattern-seers: not only what makes a business or a collection cohere, but fashion’s origin story. Most clothes are derived from fossil-fuel crude oil (think polyester). Those that aren’t? I learned not to mistake natural for good. To convert raw materials into the clothes we wear, to turn a profit, degrades the land, air, water, the human hands along its course. Strategy is also about reconciling truth with beauty.

 

I’m drawn toward solving complex problems, toward coaxing new ideas into existence, so I moved from brand writing to pioneering design for sustainability. Work is where we encounter other humans—strange and lovely others—so leadership became my craft and discipline. Mentoring, truth-telling, vulnerability, clarity, decisive action. I worked with harmony and dissonance, freedom within constraint, to make purposeful music in concert with others.

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 Though I cannot claim to be wise, I will claim the wisdom of my experiences: I have seen many suns, flown too close to some, and I am still here. Currently living inland in Northampton, MA. 

 

Live from the Mood Board is available online from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, and broadside bookshop in Northampton, MA. I am available to read, talk, think about ideas. Please get in touch.