I have been a creator my entire life. There are dozens of photographs of me making and crafting as a child: creating games to play with my brother and sister, reveling in paste and paper, and imagining worlds that I could explore on my own, dazing off into the middle distance as I envisioned far-away lands. That child is still very much a part of me, and given the pressure of society to consume instead of create, I am very glad that he has survived. These days my primary creative interests tend toward theater, wood-working, and whatever it is that parenting brings my way, though in the past I've been very engaged lots of different ways of exploring improvisation. 

In Rochester, NY I was a founding member of the improvisational theater group Search Engine Improv, with whom I performed regularly, taught improv, and organized the annual Fall Back Comedy Festival. I coached the improv teams "The Awesome Train" and "Valorous Bufanda." Relatedly, I was the co-founder and co-manager of The Space: an Venue for the Performing Arts, a publicly accessible theater made by artists for artists and their audiences.

Beyond theatre, I periodically invest substantial periods of time into the writing of poetry, which is somewhat of a disciplined practice for me: I can tend to get caught up in big, abstract ideas, and poetics requires that you stay focused and present on the world around you, something I often need to work on. Poems of mine can be found in the anthology Spirit Rising as well as in my book Way to Water.

Organizationally, I used to serve on the executive board of directors for Northeast Storytelling, was previously the national coordinator for The Transformative Language Arts Network, and served as an executive director for ARC: Arts | Religion | Culture.