About

I grew up wandering the patches of woods around my neighborhood, sticking bugs in jam jars, along with whatever twig I found them on. I liked to watch how insects move, fascinated by the mechanics of their peculiar bodies. One summer my parents took me to a fossilized seabed, full of horned coral, trilobites, and gastropods. They inhabited the oceans long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and while running my hands over their shells, I imagined their tiny lives passing in a blip of geological time, and a part of me dimly recognized my life wasn’t going to turn out much different. As I got older, I often questioned the tacit belief that people are special. Every creature is limited by its umwelt (the Germans have such great words, don’t they?), which refers to how an organism’s senses shape their experience. Simply put, fish have a hard time seeing the water they’re swimming in, but it’s still my mission to escape the fishbowl.

Aside from an abiding love for nature, I can pin my inspirations all over the map. I’m fond of the eerie grandeur of the original Alien movies, and subsequently the biomechanical artwork of H. R. Giger. I sometimes gravitate toward the hard-nosed masculinity of a story like Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club; or the brutal poetry of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; but I also enjoy the quiet reflection of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; or the whimsy of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. My family always had Audubon prints on the wall, and I was enamored with his careful attention to detail. I could sense his reverence for the architecture of life in each line of a feather, or the greater truth he captured in the way a dried leaf curls. Above all, I’m drawn to ambitious world-builders. That’s what led me toward writing and art: The power to create alternate realities, or to distill our own, as a way of processing curiosity, hope, and fear. In every creative work, I want a story so fleshed out that if I stepped off the page or canvas, I’d find all its characters busy breathing on their own, that each blade of grass would be accounted for.

I studied fine art at James Madison University in Virginia. Afterwards, I moved to the west coast, supported myself with gigs at screen printing shops, and made art for galleries. I gradually got into graphic design and learned to nerd out on packaging, typography, and branding. Then I worked for bigger companies like Facebook and Polartec, because—let’s face it—being poor sucks and I needed a way to fund my creative endeavors. When it’s time to unwind, I like yoga, scuba, and hiking in the PNW, where I currently live with my partner and shepherd-husky mix, Ani the Banani. He’s a really good boy.