For most of my creative life I have identified as a writer, and the bulk of my public “success” has been in the world of words. But, forever, I have been diligently (if haphazardly) making paintings and (with much more fear) trying to find my way into making music.

My tastes as a reader/viewer/listener are similar and also overlap with my aesthetics as a writer/painter/musician. To me, it’s all the same pot of soup. And I’m learning to dip freely. I’ve always had a ridiculous amount of generative energy. But I don’t always have the kind of focus/time/or energy for a particular way of “making.” Sometimes there are no words. Sometimes there are no images. Sometimes, no sounds. I use the various modes of creative expression to balance. While I rarely make the conscious decision (“now it’s time to paint…now it’s time to write”) it tends to happen naturally. After completing a novel, I don’t want words, or developed narratives. So I drift down into my studio where I always have (narrative laden) paintings underway.

“Underway” is the key. I usually have a dozen or more paintings in progress. So I come and go, adding details, making composition decisions, and there’s no pressure for me. No deadline. Lately, mostly, the paintings are of humans in odd circumstances (just like my novels). I am very conscious of creating potential narratives. And I spend as much time with the figures in my paintings as with characters in my books. But I never, ever, play the stories (of the people in the paintings) out in my mind. I never fill in the back story, never follow them off the painting. Never. Ever.

When I write, I write in silence. I pace my world, mumbling, staring off into space. I dig and I dig inside. When I paint, I’m in my basement studio, over-lit with good artificial lighting, Pandora radio (Tom Waits or Ravi Shankar or Dread Zeppelin) up loud, there’s a beer, just one, and I move colors. Make dots. Lines. It’s all very meditative. When I sit and look at the page (the blank page, the sentence I am grappling with) there is a kind of conscious effort. And I love the endeavor, the effort, the work. And I know how to be there, and I know how to move through both the successes and the failures. It’s a very internal and private space. But when I’m sitting, still, staring at an underway painting, it’s different. It’s not even like waiting. It’s more like sitting on a park bench and observing. Sometimes interesting people pass by. Sometimes strange things happen. Sometimes it’s just a pleasant empty nothing, which means only that you have to come back the next day.

It’s all, really, just watching the nonsense pass through my noggin. Deciding what to grab hold of, and whether to tie it down with words or with paint is the fun part.

As for the role of music in my life, it’s the mode, the medium, the place where I am most tentative, most insecure. And it is the place where I want to be the loudest. I have wanted to make music for my whole life. And I have been terrified to do so for most of that life. There is nothing logical, or pin-point-able about the fear. I had no early moment of humiliation. Lately, though, I’ve been chipping away at that wall. I’ve surrounded myself with fine instruments, and people who play. And (while I currently lack the courage to play and sing a simple song with my ukulele, even among friends and family) I’ve recently founded The Allegheny Bilge Rats Shanty Choir. I’m the front man. I wear tight black leather pants with goat hooves and jingle bells stitched up and down the legs. And I sing and stomp around the stage. Go figure.

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