Welcome to Old-Growth Gothic, a path into my written and visual creative practices. I'll be posting here regularly, focusing on writing about the darker side of things. I hope you have an enjoyable and unsettling time here.
Eleven years ago, I had just entered the Visual Studies MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Having moved to the west coast from Indiana, my exposure to the broader context of Conceptual and Contemporary art in the modern age was a jarring, upsetting, and ultimately
Beef Stroganoff My father’s favorite freeze-dried backpacking meal For years Was beef stroganoff Until the fateful day he realized It contained mushrooms. And a lifetime prejudice against all fungi provisions In that frigid moment of revelation Divorced it Instantly from his hiker’s pantry Never to be eaten again.
In 2024, I was invited to write something for Kohlhammer's upcoming publication Meta/Metal; Open Questions in Metal Studies, and this is the essay I sent them. Introduction It’s not a coincidence that I became a fan of black metal when I moved to the Pacific Northwest
This week I'm tracing back over some poetry of mine, thinking of endings, loss, grief, and reckonings. Two works surfaced, both reflections on the deaths of two different and unrelated people– one I knew rather closely over my 30s and 40s, the other I'd never known