I’m a storyteller from West Texas, working in word, song and picture.

My father was a hunter and a horseman.  The son of a Scottish tobacco farmer, his roots in the rolling hills of Eastern Kentucky were deep and abiding. My mother, his mythic opposite, is Indigenous. She was bought on the black market by a white couple at birth and severed from her people with no paper trail. Her roots in this land are an ancient, heckling mirage,  a promise of wholeness teased just beyond her grasp.

 

There are cowboys and Indians fighting over the same horse in my heart. 

Dad could fix anything - from race car engines to the tiny mechanism that makes the blinds open and close. I once watched him spend an entire Saturday going back and forth to the hardware store to repair a lawn chair that had carried the burden of my uncle’s enormous ass. I remember thinking he could just buy a new one, but that wasn’t an option for my dad. There was still a heart ticking in that old chair and a puzzle to be solved.
Mom is a retired nurse and empath. She sees ghosts all the time. 

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Stories have made it possible for me to fix things like my father and see ghosts like my mother.