It was in art school that the concept of an Inner World crystallized for me. I watched people create amazing, wonderful things from nothing. It didn’t matter what medium or genre they worked in, there was this place inside all of us where this crazy creativity came from. And I’ve always found it strange that this Inner World is something no one talks about, even though we all know it’s there. I want to talk about it.

World Building and this connection to our Inner World are what light me up. I want to explore them and encourage you to do the same, to strengthen that connection to the voice inside. I want to help stoke the fires that turn ideas into ecstatic, heart-wrenching narratives, and punch-you-in-the-guts stories.

As much as I loved living in a tent for 3-months at archeology field school, after surviving the rigid discipline of the Navy and then trying to hammer myself into a mold that clearly didn’t fit, I needed something to change. And that wasn’t going to happen if all I was doing was learning a new way to classify things and put them into little boxes. I wanted to break out of the linear way of thinking I’d always known. I wanted to learn to think organically. So, I shifted to art. I majored in sculpture because it gave me the freedom to experiment. I could work in any medium I wanted, from casting and smithing metal, to making ceramics or doing fiber art. Art school changed how I saw the world. I thought more holistically, what later went on my corporate employee reviews as “outside the box thinking”.