I’m a writer who makes art and an artist who writes about the things most of us would rather look away from — and what they can become if you stay in the room long enough. Years ago, when I sold art for a living, a mentor told me, “It’s not what you see, it’s how you see it.” He was talking about paintings. It took me a long time to realize he’d handed me a way to live.
For years I did the seeing for other people. I was a gallery director and an art dealer — the one holding the light up to everyone else’s work. Then I lost my home, suddenly, and spent the better part of a year without a fixed address in a city I’d loved for three decades. I could tell that story as an injustice, and some days I still do. But somewhere in that year I began to read it differently — less as something done to me, more as an invitation I hadn’t known how to accept. It carried me back to the shore I grew up on: Tsawwassen, the land facing the sea. Light, stillness, eagles overhead — everything I’d been missing without a name for it.
That’s when the writing came back. Now I keep a monthly letter called Light of Hand, where I work at turning soul wounds into wisdom, one essay at a time — on the patterns we repeat, the symbols life keeps sending, art, travel, and the odd grace of finding light in dark places. My first essay, “Finding Light in Dark Spaces,” lives there, and a memoir is in the making.
If this sounds like your kind of conversation, pull up a chair. I’d love to have you along.
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