I’m a photographer, storyist*, and poet, but it’s what I’m not that keeps from making a living at any or all of these talents. I’m not a businessperson. Otherwise I would probably be spending most of my time traveling across the country as a performer.
Not that I’m complaining about my current job. As an employee of a private company, I have it pretty good. I don’t have anyone watching over my shoulder and I’m doing what I dreamed of doing when I was a kid. When I was five, we traveled to Oregon to sightsee and visit relatives. I followed our routes on road and street maps and became so enthralled with the concept of maps that I started making my own, of places real and imaginary. Now I work as the lone cartographer for a company specializing in road and street maps of Oregon. But now there are so many other ways for people to find their way from point A to point B that selling maps is getting harder all the time, so the cartographer’s job is as insecure as the slide rule manufacturer’s job was thirty years ago. So I have to keep my options open.
I put together a program of slides, stories, and poems about my experiences spending summers at Alaska’s Denali National Park. I performed this program for environmental groups, retirement homes, classrooms, and in other settings in nearly twenty states across the country. This program was always well-received and I usually made a fair amount from sales and stipends, but I could never market it in a way that I could make a living at it. I have ideas for other programs combining my talents and at some point would like to once again hit the road as a performer.
* - the term story-teller can refer to someone who tells stories written by others. I prefer the term storyist as someone who tells self-written stories.
