Where this comes from
My parents' divorce was hard in the way that does not announce itself. My mother suffered silently. My father needed the room to be about him. I was about ten, anxious and flattened, and a Sunday School teacher noticed before any adult with a title did.
She told me to write what I was feeling as a poem. I have been writing poetry since I was nine. It has saved my life more than once, and it is still the first place I go when something is too big to say plainly.
There is another life in here too: thirty years of marriage and a songwriting partnership with my husband. We had been married for twenty years before we discovered we could write music together — an accident of fate, honestly. It turned out to be the start of something: more than eighty songs in the few years since, and we are still writing and copyrighting music together. A fourth EP is on the way in November. Melodies, lyrics, the long drive home from a gig. It is not separate from the research. It is where the listening comes from.
None of our lyrics are really happy. They are how I process grief and a lost childhood. The music is what carries them — driving, insistent, pushing the words to the top where they can finally be heard.
I have to constantly create. That is why the Ed.D. is so good for me — I am kind of restless and I need knowledge the way some people need quiet. The dissertation, the songs, the poems, the paint on the trim at midnight: it is all the same engine. The back room is where it idles.