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"I think you want me to get married after school, have kids and live in Cleveland forever!" I shouted at my mother during a post-adolescent fit years ago. I was 22. Flexing some of my first real independence, I told her I was going to move to Miami, FL before I graduated. At the time, I had meant the statement as a pejorative. Nothing felt more trapping and terrifying than getting married and having babies in Ohio. Part of me felt like this was obvious. She surprised me by replying: "So what if I do?" The elephant was out of the...

A few years ago I took a risk at a family pop up event in Austin. The organizers asked me to pitch an art activity for families. I sat on the thought for weeks. What if we painted with toys? What if we created comic books? Eventually I settled on an unlikely idea. I picked up dozens of floor carpets from a thrift store, some essential oil, a diffuser, and soft music. On the day of the event I spread the studio floors with Austin Coloring Book pages, mason jars of coloring supplies... and waited.  We were going to color. {Color?} people looked at me...

I've been asked to speak to high school groups this past year about being a working aritst. This is the story I've shared with them: Failing out of design school. The culture loves trumpeting the value of failure. Over happy hours and in self-help seminars, we all give lipservice to the value of failing. This is all fine and good, but in practice we're usually behaving in the exact opposite way: The culture and its institutions tend to be highly critical of failure, often punishing creative risk takers. That kind of atmosphere leaves creative people confused and often totally failure-avoidant. Many even make it well into adulthood without ever...

“You better be nice to me,” I used to tell Winston. “When you’re dead I’ll be the only one who can listen to you.”   “I’m going to haunt your ass in the bathroom,” Winston said with a cigarette raspy belly laugh. “While you’re sitting on the toilet.”   Winston and I waited tables at the Four Seasons together. He was 62, I was 30. Winston was, in short, deeply loved by perfect strangers on the regular. Guests would return to his tables over and over until they were nearly family. By the time he told me he would haunt my...

  When I was 8 years old, I had a dream that I died. I was on the swing behind my childhood home. As I kicked higher on that swing, a man came out onto the back porch. He was waving a gun. Jolted by fear I leapt off my swing to flee. He shot me in the chest before I hit the ground. My omniscient self watched as I exploded upwards into the air-  arms outstretched like wings. Instead of crumpling to the ground, I flew joyously skyward, through the branches of two big oak trees that still reside in my...