Ellen Denham's Blog, page 2

Musings on Singing, and Getting Older

One thing I say to my students frequently is that you have to sing with, and love, the voice you have, not the voice you wish you had.  This doesn’t mean that you simply sing whatever comes out of your mouth unexamined and don’t work on improvement, but you also have to love your voice.  Loving your voice means letting it tell you what you should be singing.

Naturally I need to apply this to myself as well.  I sometimes jokingly refer to myself as a “recovering coloratura.”  I used to have lots of high notes.  Now, not so much.  But I don’t know that I was ever really a coloratura soprano.  Sure, I got an encouragement award at the district Met Auditions singing “Juliette’s Waltz” when I was 21, but I never got work singing that repertoire. I got work singing Bach and Handel, and small opera roles, and realized where I really excelled was in Baroque repertoire, and that in opera terms, I was a soubrette, the most common voice type for young sopranos, therefore the most competitive.

Years later, when I was in my 30s and at the age when one might graduate from soubrette repertoire to something a little heavier, I studied with a voice teacher who experimented with giving me some heavier, full-lyric repertoire.  It never really suited my voice, and as I got into my 40s, watching younger folks get the roles I used to sing even though I felt in many ways I was singing better than ever, I realized that I was basically a middle-aged soubrette, and I wasn’t likely to get cast, as those are generally considered young singer roles.

Then I discovered my other super power—singing atonal music.  While still in high school I drilled intervals in an Advanced Placement music theory class and got very good at them.  It doesn’t matter if it is a tritone, major seventh, if it is in the scale, chord, or anywhere in the instrumentation.  If I can relate it to the pitch I just sang or one I hear in an instrument, I can sing it. I also discovered that though I wasn’t likely to get cast in the opera roles that best suited my voice, there were other theatrical pieces that suited me very well—anything by Kurt Weill.  Sondheim.

Now I do more teaching and directing than performing, but I still love to sing and want to continue to perform.  It is frustrating that I have reached the age where I have lost a bit on the top of my range. My voice hasn’t dropped enough or darkened in color that I could reasonably consider myself a mezzo, and fast, melismatic pieces like “Rejoice Greatly” from Messiahstill feel great to sing, though the optional high notes are less reliable.  So I am more or less a middle-aged soprano without much strength in what were once my “money notes.”

I am a more intelligent singer now, though, and I can relax and enjoy singing in some ways more than when I was younger and stressed more about making it perfect.  There is a lot of repertoire I can still sing, including some very beautiful art songs, musical theatre, contemporary works, and yes, still a lot of my beloved Bach and Handel.  My low range is stronger.  I am a better interpreter.

I’m not going to lie—sometimes I feel like I would give anything to have the voice I had twenty some years ago, when I could soar up to a high E-flat with ease, when I was spending so much time performing that I kept my voice in tip-top shape, when now I tend to get out of practice because I am devoting so much more energy to other things besides performing.  But I have to say, I do still love my voice.  And, as my husband can attest, I still dance around the living room for the sheer joy of singing when I practice “Rejoice Greatly.”

A young singer must learn how to sing a wide variety of appropriate repertoire in order to master technique and explore different types of music.  Eventually you will want to specialize–find the repertoire that really makes your voice dance!  It may not be what you think, or what you started out with, and it will change over time, but it is out there, just waiting for your beautiful voice to bring it to life.

https://soundcloud.com/ellen-denham/juliettes-waltz

Here is an audition recording I made a number of years ago, with Dan Peelor at the piano, singing Juliette’s Waltz. I remember feeling out of practice—I hadn’t had a regular voice teacher for a few years and wasn’t spending as much time singing as when I had finished my MM degree a few years before.  But now I am glad to have this recording—a snapshot of the voice I used to have, like an old photograph.  I notice things that were easier for me then, as well as things that are easier for me now.

Moving to Texas

I am thrilled to officially announce my appointment as Professional Assistant Professor of Music at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, where beginning this August, I will be directing the Opera Workshop program and teaching voice. I look forward very much to working with the wonderful faculty and students and to this next adventure!

Did I mention that the campus is on its own island?

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The campus of TAMUCC.

This means many changes ahead, and I am excited not only for the job but to get the chance to explore a part of the country with which I am not very familiar.  I am looking forward to getting to know Corpus Christi and nearby Padre Island, where I am sure I will be doing some birdwatching, swimming, and kayaking.  I am also looking forward to day and overnight trips as well as more extended vacations exploring all of these places within a day’s drive:  New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, South Padre Island, Big Bend National Park, the Hill Country, and more!

Since we will be moving to a hot climate, it is fitting that Stephan and I visited Alaska last month, on a wonderful small boat cruise with Alaskan Dream, which was truly the vacation a lifetime.  We saw glaciers, humpback whales, bald eagles, numerous other types of birds, and some of the most beautiful, wild, landscapes imaginable.

Iceberg in Alaska’s inside passage.

We have many more pictures (nearly 300!) uploaded to an album here:  Ellen and Stephan’s Alaskan Dream.

To new adventures, new colleagues, students, and friends!

Moving to Texas

I am thrilled to officially announce my appointment as Professional Assistant Professor of Music at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, where beginning this August, I will be directing the Opera Workshop program and teaching voice. I look forward very much to working with the wonderful faculty and students and to this next adventure!

Did I mention that the campus is on its own island?

[image error]The campus of TAMUCC.

This means many changes ahead, and I am excited not only for the job but to get the chance to explore a part of the country with which I am not very familiar.  I am looking forward to getting to know Corpus Christi and nearby Padre Island, where I am sure I will be doing some birdwatching, swimming, and kayaking.  I am also looking forward to day and overnight trips as well as more extended vacations exploring all of these places within a day’s drive:  New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, South Padre Island, Big Bend National Park, the Hill Country, and more!

Since we will be moving to a hot climate, it is fitting that Stephan and I visited Alaska last month, on a wonderful small boat cruise with Alaskan Dream, which was truly the vacation a lifetime.  We saw glaciers, humpback whales, bald eagles, numerous other types of birds, and some of the most beautiful, wild, landscapes imaginable.

Iceberg in Alaska’s inside passage.

We have many more pictures (nearly 300!) uploaded to an album here:  Ellen and Stephan’s Alaskan Dream.

To new adventures, new colleagues, students, and friends!

How “Stars and the Moon” misses the boat

I’ve heard people gush about the song “Stars and the Moon” as having a positive message for women.  However, it is not a song about female empowerment.  Here’s why.

I don’t remember exactly when I was first exposed to the song “Stars and the Moon” from Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World, but I believe it was when a voice student brought it in wanting to sing it.  Since then, I’ve had several students sing the song over the years.  It’s a good song–very singable, in a good, middle range for singers of varying levels of ability and allows the singer to display acting ability.  Some students have been very excited about the “message” of the lyrics that money isn’t everything and it’s better to choose things that will make you happy.

The song is from the point of view of a woman who turned down two men who promised interesting life experiences because she preferred to have stability and wealth instead.  Then she married the wealthy man and realized there was more to life than money and maybe she had missed out on some things in life.  The lyrics are available here:  http://www.lyricsmania.com/stars_and_the_moon_lyrics_songs_for_a_new_world.html

But the more I heard the song, the more the message made me uncomfortable.  I didn’t like the protagonist much.  She seemed shallow at the beginning, wanting only to say “yes” to a man who could provide the extravagant lifestyle she seemed to think she deserved (and though this is not in the song, reading between the lines, one can imagine that she must think pretty highly of herself and her looks and whatever other qualities she has that can presumably “win” her the right rich man).  But in the end, all she seems to have learned is that money isn’t everything, which is rather trite and not really all that interesting a revelation.  What she hasn’t learned is that relationships are a mixture of give and take—the song always lists the things the various men promise her, and never what she has to offer in return.  What she hasn’t learned is that sometimes you can go out and live your life without waiting for a romantic partner to “give” it to you.  In some ways, I like her less at the end of the song than the beginning, because she’s still selfishly focused on what another person can offer her and whining about what she will “never have.”  Any potential larger lesson seems to have gone right over her head.

Today, for some reason, I found the song stuck in my head.  It is a good song, with catchy lyrics, after all, even if the story rubs me the wrong way.  I had another realization of why I don’t like this woman much.  I don’t believe she is real.  Now, obviously, she’s a fictional character, but she comes across as more of a caricature than a real person.  Though the song is from her point of view, it doesn’t seem like an authentic woman’s voice.  It seems more believable to me that this is really the point of view of one of the men she turned down, who, when finding out via social media that she has married the rich guy, thinks to himself, “She’s going to be really miserable.  Someday she’ll realize that I could have offered her so much more.”  Then he writes a song ostensibly from her point of view, imagining a shallow, self-absorbed cardboard cutout of a person who really should have been in love with him because he had more interesting things to offer.

News flash!  No matter how nice or interesting a man is or what he may promise, a woman isn’t obligated to be romantically interested.  This sounds a lot more like male entitlement and male gaze than how a woman in the story might actually see herself.  The rejected suitor knows he “deserved” her and that someday she will regret not choosing him.  (“Yeah, she got her yacht, but I’m a nice guy!”  Sound familiar?)  He believes that he offered the better package deal than the other guy, therefore she should choose him.  If you give a woman nice things, she’s supposed to like you, right?  Even if those things are great, romantic, exciting experiences rather than money.   Now perhaps I’m reading things into the story and its characters that were never intended, but the idea that this song is really a construct of one of the men the woman rejects, rather than an authentic portrayal of what a woman might experience, feels like it makes more sense.

The woman in the song self-objectifies to the point that she sees herself as a commodity to be given to the highest bidder, willing to wait until she gets the right offer.  Guy #2, the one with the motorcycle, only wanted her to “spare a week—“ if she was really interested in him and the experiences he could offer, why on earth wouldn’t she say yes?  Because that would “spoil” her for the rich guy she is so sure is just around the corner?

Now, don’t get me wrong—I think the message that it’s ok to go out and have adventures and not play your whole life too safe, only to regret it later, is a good one.  The message that money isn’t everything is a good one.  But I’m not buying the woman in this song.  A real woman, I believe, would consider a relationship as a two-way street, not simply a transaction in which she shops for the best offer based on what he can give to her.  A real woman, if realizing that she played it too safe in her romantic or other adventures, would probably get out there and do something about it instead of whining that she will “never have the moon.”  A real woman might try to design her own life and go out and have some experiences without waiting for a man to give it all to her.  Sorry, Jason Robert Brown, but in this case you didn’t write a real woman.

Doctoral Studies Almost Complete

I have not been a very regular blogger, but now that I am coming to the end of my doctoral studies, I hope to update this entire web site with some information on my more recent activities, including video links to performances and my lecture-recital. I hope to be able to share some news soon on where I am headed next.

Family Trip to Chincoteague

My family took several trips to Chincoteague Island when my sister and I were children. We developed a special fondness for the island and the wildlife there. We just returned from an excellent family vacation to Chincoteague and it lived up to all the excellent memories. Stephan and I, my sister Amy and her husband Jonathan, my father, John, and my uncle and aunt Bob and Rachel all rented a house for a week with a view of the sound, looking back toward the mainland, and just across a narrow channel from a small, marshy island with a few trees at the edge. We had a huge picture window overlooking this, and greatly enjoyed birdwatching right from the couch!

Highlights of the trip included:

–Enjoying the house: visiting with family, cooking dinner together, watching birds and sunsets from the living room and the outdoor deck, celebrating the same-sex marriage decision.

Chincoteague Sunset

–Drives around the wildlife loop at the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge and the Beach Road to see all sorts of waterbirds, wild ponies, sika deer, and the beautiful natural landscape.

Wild Ponies on Assateague

–Swimming and jumping waves on the pristine beaches of Assateague Island National Seashore.

Family Beach Trip

–Taking a boat trip with Daisey’s Island Cruises, where we saw dolphins, osprey, a bald eagle, numerous other birds, and learned a lot about island history and about the pony swim.

–Getting to spend an hour or so at the Tom’s Cove Visitor Center with a park ranger who showed us and told us about lots of the birds on the island.

–A trip to the NASA Wallops Island Flight Facility open house, where we got to see how sounding rockets are built, talk to engineers and scientists, and learn about important projects like measuring soil moisture, sea ice levels, and other things via satellites, rockets, and airplanes.

Learning About Sounding Rockets

Some of the favorite birds we saw included: the endangered piping plover, green herons, yellow-crowned night herons, black-crowned night herons, great blue herons, willets, osprey, bald eagle, little blue herons, tricolored herons, great egrets, snowy egrets, and cattle egrets, glossy ibises, several types of tern, brown pelicans, black skimmers…I think that covers the main ones!

Snowy Egret and Great Egret Near Sea Star Cafe

On June 23 while on vacation I started doing 20 minutes of aerobic dance every morning and plan to keep it up. I do a fair amount of walking, yoga, and so forth, but I am very sporadic about working up a sweat and really getting in something aerobic every day. I figure this is a good baseline to start with and many days I will also get more exercise as well.

Now that I’m back, it’s time to get serious about studying for my qualifying exams!

Family Trip to Chincoteague

My family took several trips to Chincoteague Island when my sister and I were children. We developed a special fondness for the island and the wildlife there. We just returned from an excellent family vacation to Chincoteague and it lived up to all the excellent memories. Stephan and I, my sister Amy and her husband Jonathan, my father, John, and my uncle and aunt Bob and Rachel all rented a house for a week with a view of the sound, looking back toward the mainland, and just across a narrow channel from a small, marshy island with a few trees at the edge. We had a huge picture window overlooking this, and greatly enjoyed birdwatching right from the couch!

Highlights of the trip included:

–Enjoying the house: visiting with family, cooking dinner together, watching birds and sunsets from the living room and the outdoor deck, celebrating the same-sex marriage decision.

Chincoteague Sunset

–Drives around the wildlife loop at the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge and the Beach Road to see all sorts of waterbirds, wild ponies, sika deer, and the beautiful natural landscape.

Wild Ponies on Assateague

–Swimming and jumping waves on the pristine beaches of Assateague Island National Seashore.

Family Beach Trip

–Taking a boat trip with Daisey’s Island Cruises, where we saw dolphins, osprey, a bald eagle, numerous other birds, and learned a lot about island history and about the pony swim.

–Getting to spend an hour or so at the Tom’s Cove Visitor Center with a park ranger who showed us and told us about lots of the birds on the island.

–A trip to the NASA Wallops Island Flight Facility open house, where we got to see how sounding rockets are built, talk to engineers and scientists, and learn about important projects like measuring soil moisture, sea ice levels, and other things via satellites, rockets, and airplanes.

Learning About Sounding Rockets

Some of the favorite birds we saw included: the endangered piping plover, green herons, yellow-crowned night herons, black-crowned night herons, great blue herons, willets, osprey, bald eagle, little blue herons, tricolored herons, great egrets, snowy egrets, and cattle egrets, glossy ibises, several types of tern, brown pelicans, black skimmers…I think that covers the main ones!

Snowy Egret and Great Egret Near Sea Star Cafe

On June 23 while on vacation I started doing 20 minutes of aerobic dance every morning and plan to keep it up. I do a fair amount of walking, yoga, and so forth, but I am very sporadic about working up a sweat and really getting in something aerobic every day. I figure this is a good baseline to start with and many days I will also get more exercise as well.

Now that I’m back, it’s time to get serious about studying for my qualifying exams!

Destroying Science Fiction, 930 Words at a Time

My story The Mouths came out in Lightspeed Magazine today, which has caused me to reflect on my own relationship with Science Fiction and gender.

Buy the issue here in paperback:

Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014 (Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue) (Volume 49)

Or here for Kindle:

Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

The beginnings of my history with Science Fiction are somewhat murky, I think because this came at a time in my life when I was such a voracious reader that it’s hard to pinpoint the chronology. I have stronger memories of reading some of my favorite fantasies for the first time—The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down,–because they made a huge impression on me when I was still quite young. I carried both of these around elementary school for years and read and reread them. It’s not that I didn’t read other books, but to me, nothing else really measured up.

At some point as a teenager I began to read Science Fiction. I may have started with Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, books which I enjoyed, but didn’t feel the need to obsessively reread. I read classic sci fi, enough that I don’t even recall all the titles and authors now, as some of them seemed to blend together. I know these included A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., and Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. My memories of these books are pretty old now, but I do recall at some point getting burned out, particularly by Heinlein, because I got tired of the overwhelming maleness of it all. I’d read stories by male authors with male protagonists for most of my life—that wasn’t the issue. But something in classic sci fi seemed not just to ignore women, but to actively belittle them and reduce them to caricature. This isn’t something I plan to try to quantify by going back and looking for specific examples. I’m sure this has been done. It’s just a gut feeling I had, and once I noticed it, the reading wasn’t much fun anymore.

Sometime after high school, I decided there had to be more to Science Fiction than what I had read. I sought out more Science Fiction by women, and discovered the work of writers including Octavia Butler and Sherri Tepper. I started to love Science Fiction again. Since then, I’ve enjoyed science fiction by a multitude of authors of both genders. It’s a wonderful art form, a literature of ideas, of the new and strange, a way to make us examine ourselves in ways we may not have ever considered.

I never thought I would write it. I’m a musician and the only science I took beyond high school was “Earthquakes and Volcanoes—”a dummed-down geology for performing arts majors. I love science and grew up watching the original Cosmos. But I don’t have the background to understand the details, and this means I can’t write them convincingly.

Except maybe something anthropological, and very short—lean on the details. After all, I may not know much hard science, but I can spin weird ideas with the best of them. For me as a writer, the beauty of speculative fiction is being able to examine ourselves by pitting us against the Other—something non-human, whether a dryad, merman, or alien. I didn’t set out to write Science Fiction when I wrote The Mouths. I just had a what-if and went with it. I envisioned the strange creatures who consumed but never did anything, and worked out a framework in which to present them. I do recall brainstorming this story at TNEO (The Never-ending Odyssey, an annual workshop for Odyssey grads) way back in 2008 and getting some good inspiration to actually sit down and write it.

I’ve read it aloud at a bookstore reading and at least one convention, and have come to the conclusion that I’d usually rather read something funny. When you read something very short and very weird, it’s difficult to gauge the audience’s reaction. Do the confused looks mean they didn’t get it? Didn’t like it? Or are they just processing the weirdness?

I’m not doing much non-academic writing these days as being a doctoral student in music is consuming much of my energy, but I did promise myself I would continue to submit. Since The Mouths is really the only thing I’ve written that qualifies as Science Fiction, I submitted it to the Lightspeed special issue just to feel like I had something out on the market. I didn’t expect to get an acceptance, not just because I knew it would be competitive, but because I am honestly not sure sometimes what to make of the story myself. It’s short. It’s weird. Is it any good? I suppose the moral of that story is to let an editor decide, and then see what the readers think. I can’t even begin to quantify how thrilled I am to be included in the table of contents with some of the “big guns” in Science Fiction. I got my contributor’s copy today and look forward to some reading time in the weeks ahead.

Destroying Science Fiction, 930 Words at a Time

My story The Mouths came out in Lightspeed Magazine today, which has caused me to reflect on my own relationship with Science Fiction and gender.

Buy the issue here in paperback:

Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014 (Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue) (Volume 49)

Or here for Kindle:

Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

The beginnings of my history with Science Fiction are somewhat murky, I think because this came at a time in my life when I was such a voracious reader that it’s hard to pinpoint the chronology. I have stronger memories of reading some of my favorite fantasies for the first time—The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down,–because they made a huge impression on me when I was still quite young. I carried both of these around elementary school for years and read and reread them. It’s not that I didn’t read other books, but to me, nothing else really measured up.

At some point as a teenager I began to read Science Fiction. I may have started with Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, books which I enjoyed, but didn’t feel the need to obsessively reread. I read classic sci fi, enough that I don’t even recall all the titles and authors now, as some of them seemed to blend together. I know these included A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., and Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. My memories of these books are pretty old now, but I do recall at some point getting burned out, particularly by Heinlein, because I got tired of the overwhelming maleness of it all. I’d read stories by male authors with male protagonists for most of my life—that wasn’t the issue. But something in classic sci fi seemed not just to ignore women, but to actively belittle them and reduce them to caricature. This isn’t something I plan to try to quantify by going back and looking for specific examples. I’m sure this has been done. It’s just a gut feeling I had, and once I noticed it, the reading wasn’t much fun anymore.

Sometime after high school, I decided there had to be more to Science Fiction than what I had read. I sought out more Science Fiction by women, and discovered the work of writers including Octavia Butler and Sherri Tepper. I started to love Science Fiction again. Since then, I’ve enjoyed science fiction by a multitude of authors of both genders. It’s a wonderful art form, a literature of ideas, of the new and strange, a way to make us examine ourselves in ways we may not have ever considered.

I never thought I would write it. I’m a musician and the only science I took beyond high school was “Earthquakes and Volcanoes—”a dummed-down geology for performing arts majors. I love science and grew up watching the original Cosmos. But I don’t have the background to understand the details, and this means I can’t write them convincingly.

Except maybe something anthropological, and very short—lean on the details. After all, I may not know much hard science, but I can spin weird ideas with the best of them. For me as a writer, the beauty of speculative fiction is being able to examine ourselves by pitting us against the Other—something non-human, whether a dryad, merman, or alien. I didn’t set out to write Science Fiction when I wrote The Mouths. I just had a what-if and went with it. I envisioned the strange creatures who consumed but never did anything, and worked out a framework in which to present them. I do recall brainstorming this story at TNEO (The Never-ending Odyssey, an annual workshop for Odyssey grads) way back in 2008 and getting some good inspiration to actually sit down and write it.

I’ve read it aloud at a bookstore reading and at least one convention, and have come to the conclusion that I’d usually rather read something funny. When you read something very short and very weird, it’s difficult to gauge the audience’s reaction. Do the confused looks mean they didn’t get it? Didn’t like it? Or are they just processing the weirdness?

I’m not doing much non-academic writing these days as being a doctoral student in music is consuming much of my energy, but I did promise myself I would continue to submit. Since The Mouths is really the only thing I’ve written that qualifies as Science Fiction, I submitted it to the Lightspeed special issue just to feel like I had something out on the market. I didn’t expect to get an acceptance, not just because I knew it would be competitive, but because I am honestly not sure sometimes what to make of the story myself. It’s short. It’s weird. Is it any good? I suppose the moral of that story is to let an editor decide, and then see what the readers think. I can’t even begin to quantify how thrilled I am to be included in the table of contents with some of the “big guns” in Science Fiction. I got my contributor’s copy today and look forward to some reading time in the weeks ahead.

Summer begins

I’ve done a bit of sprucing up and updating of the various pages here, including uploading some songs from my recent doctoral recital to my Performance page. Drop by and give them a listen!

In other news, I survived a pretty busy semester of doctoral studies, in which I did quite a bit of performing—in addition to my recital, I performed a role in Love Games, a new musical by Joseph Turrin based on a play by Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler. This was lots of fun and involved my character, the Actress, being a total bitch and seducing two very different men. Oh, and singing a song about infidelity while jumping on a bed! I also took a songwriting class this semester, and in addition to performing the songs of other students in the class, I wrote lyrics and composed music for some songs as well. On our final recital, we performed the compositions members of the class had composed and also some of our favorite American songs we had been assigned to sing over the course of the class. I am now very close to completing my doctoral coursework, which is exciting!

Eddie Brennan and Ellen Denham as the Count and the Actress in Love Games

Stephan and I and family took a wonderful trip to Jamaica earlier this month, in which, among other things, we did some backcountry caving which involved slogging through an underground river up to our waists for quite a while, crawling on hands and knees, climbing, and generally getting very wet and muddy. I’ve always wanted to do something like that as opposed to the tamer cave visits with handrails and walkways and electric lights that we have in southern Indiana. Actually, I can’t wait to do some more rough caving! With an experienced guide, of course. Other highlights of the trip included swimming in the absolutely perfect waters, shopping for fruits and veggies in the Falmouth market, jumping in a pristine river at Blue Hole, and relaxing, eating great food, drinking rum and Red Stripes. I absolutely love Jamaica and especially love getting off the beaten path and outside of the major tourist areas.

I’ll be teaching at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp again later this summer. In the meantime, I’m catching up on some writing and submitting (submitted two short stories and one scholarly article over the weekend) and doing some freelance grantwriting and editing projects.