About

I’m fascinated with creativity (Big Magic nod to Elizabeth Gilbert), having played with its magic when I was young. I’m grateful it stuck around a few decades, waiting for me to wake up and listen:

You don’t need permission (or another degree) to create anything.

You are going to fail. A lot.

Everything is practice.

When you seek approval or validation, you’re losing time.

Time is the most precious resource, so let’s not pretend otherwise.

I’m also interested in what work means and who we are as workers. At 21, I read Studs Terkel’s book Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do. It helped shaped my career path and explains why I bristle at calling people resources.

Labor history, like African and Native American histories, is vitally important, violent, and missing from classrooms and adult reckoning. Despite centuries-long suffering in the fight for collective bargaining rights, many labor leaders fought hard for segregation until the mid-20th century.

Where work and ethnicity intersect led me to research whether identifying as Black, Latino, Asian or caucasian was tied to different work values. Turns out, the race/ethnicity box we check is pretty meaningless. But how strongly we identify with that group helps explain what’s important to us.

Values differences within each group were larger than differences across groups. The takeaway? Group identity matters, but never take categorical short cuts. (In the words of an old journalism professor: Assume makes an ass out of u and me.)

A lot of what I write, collage and paint is about work, inspired by workers with various, sometimes intersecting, identities.

I hope you find something here to enjoy.