When I received the call telling me I didn’t get the job, I was devastated. On the opposite end of the line, the producer explained it to me. The other candidate had a journalism degree, he said, and had even completed an internship in a newsroom. My credentials, on the other hand, just didn’t match what they were looking for.… Read more →
On a gray fall day, nearly ten years ago, I was in the woods. It was around nine in the morning and it was cool. I was dressed to work with leather gloves, boots, and a tough canvas jacket. A thermos of hot coffee was waiting for me near an idling tractor. My breath materialized around me in pale, ephemeral… Read more →
Late in the fall of 2005 I was working backstage as a costume assistant in a play which had little use for me. Costume changes were few and far between and the actors were fully capable of donning their accoutrement without help from any one of the five assistants in the dressing room. As the days dragged on, we assistants… Read more →
I was young, maybe nine years old, when I first visited the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. Immediately upon entering I perceived I had entered some venerable space. I had never been to an art museum before, not that I could recall, and the milieu of this one captured me instantly. The carefully choreographed paths of light, the… Read more →
It was late in the afternoon on a brisk February day in Lander, Wyoming, and my hands were full of art supplies. I stood at the door of Sweetwater Studio, looking at the antler-shaped handle, a collapsible easel in my left hand, a portfolio heavy with drawing paper in my right. A full-to-the-brim messenger bag was slung over my shoulder.… Read more →