About My Work

Welcome, friends and folks, to my home on the internet.

I'm an educator, storyteller, and analyst specializing in helping people unlock their creativity and critical think through stories and games. I believe that learning is a lifelong process and should help each of us to become stronger, more confident, and better able to help our communities.

I've always consumed stories voraciously. Not quickly, because maintaining focus on a single book and remaining still in a seat to read has always been a struggle, but deeply and with an intense attention to details which might help me understand the story and the characters and the internal logic running through it. Then I discovered audio books and learned that I could enjoy a story while also doing something practical with my hands... and began playing video games which told a story as much through their gameplay systems as their cutscenes and mission briefings.

Whether thinking about films, games, or literature, the same three questions always pop up in my mind: What is this trying to do? What does it actually do? And, what can we learn from the space between those two answers?

Those questions have been the spine of everything I've made, from lesson plans and chess courses to photography collections and video essays. It's the question I bring to a film that should have worked but didn't. To a game that failed on its own terms and still created an oddly compelling experience. To a chess position where the right move looks like the wrong one, until you look three steps deeper.

The gap between what a story says it's doing and what it's actually doing is often where the hidden truths live. Teaching showed me that. Years of writing adventure novels and science fiction trained me to feel the comfort of a story gone wrong and the discontent of a narrative which feels too cohesive.