Like a force of nature, here comes The Housewrighter
At long last, the site I have envisioned since 2010 is a reality. For those of you here from The Blissful Adventurer, thank you for your amazing support over the years. I hope you will enjoy this new iteration of my work and share once again in the comments and details of what I am posting.
What the hell is a Housewrighter? That is a great question. A friend of mine in San Francisco suggested that my previous site sounded like a new age retreat, and that I am far from new age. I agreed with him immediately, and set out to find a new name to better illustrate what I do. He mentioned that my surname carried a lot of weight, and that perhaps something incorporating it would be better for branding. While I generally despise marketing terms, I trusted him, and within a couple of days I had come up with this:
Housewrighter - (n) A person, who through the use of words and images, foments intrigue, elation, and possibly even derision, in his/her readers. see Housewright (v)
Housewrighting is, in essence, what I do. Since I was a child my opinions and beliefs lived beside me in the wide-open. Give me a pulpit to preach, and I will share the joys of travel, the beauty in nature, and my belief that the fastest way to a peaceful planet, is to sit down with people we do not know, and share a meal.
My stories come from a rural upbringing in Bristol, TX, living abroad in Italy, and traveling the planet, looking for community, in hungry men and women.
I once called myself a "Wine Evangelist". I believed that drinking wine in a group of semi-hostile companions would bring harmony to the table in short-order. I now know, it is really the act of dining (with or without the wine) that can assuage the nasty nature of man. I do not travel to check places off a list. I travel to see the vision of a people, and the condition of a place with my own lenses, and my own hunting-and-pecking fingers.
Travel for me is a place where there is joy. The joy burns out the pain, and is the most calming of therapies I've ever known. My photography is an outcropping of this joy, and it now has an existence of its own. I subscribe to a philosophy learned from the great Sam Krisch, I don't intend to capture images that necessarily convey what I see when I press the shutter, I intend to capture images that suggest how I felt, when I saw them. This is the quintessential crux of my work. I will not attempt to communicate information to you from a journalistic perspective, absent of editorial content. I am going to deliver a message intended to show you something beautiful, from what sometimes are the most banal of situations, and in my own words, filtered through my imagination. Fact and Fiction are shared alike here, and the lines will frequently be grayed between these poles.
This is travel! Whether in my town, 40 miles away in San Francisco, or 8000+ in Hong Kong, I am always traveling. Because I take myself away from that which is known, and walk right the fuck into something where I have no idea what I will find. This is my adventure, my joy, and mostly my hope for the rest of my existence.
Won't you join me on this path, at least for a bit? Come aboard, pour yourself a glass of bubbles, eat something, and get lost with me.
And if you do, prepare to be Housewrighted.
