About Us

Pyragraph features blog posts and other content from folks working on creative projects, indie business ventures, community organizing and passion projects of all kinds. Our format is “entertaining stories and lessons learned” with an emphasis on helpful, supportive, practical content by and for fellow indies.

Our daily posting operation ended in 2017 and since then we use this platform to experiment with ways to empower and elevate artists, community organizers and independent workers. Our posts and projects are all aimed at helping readers keep their fires burning and navigate their own unique independent path.

AI Policy

We do not use AI to generate content — text, images, graphic designs, videos or other media — period. There’s a lot of tech involved for even a tiny digital property, and we are a small, volunteer team. We do use some AI chatbots (mostly ChatGPT and Gemini, some Perplexity) as research tools to help us DIY manage this site and the other technologies and platforms we use. We do not have any AI agents running anything related to Pyragraph; we are considering trying this to automate things like image sizing or other publishing processes. Pretty much all the tech tools and platforms we use have built-in AI features, and we spend considerable time turning them off, and later doing more research (generally via Google which now is basically an AI query) on how to make them stay turned off.

We have deep concerns about AI’s impact on media, information sharing, discourse and humanity. We are committed to the human work of writing, editing, design, photography and videomaking, and we ask our Contributors to share this commitment and to never submit AI-generated content. We do not use tools to police this, but rely on the relationships we have with our Contributors.

We invite you to contribute feedback or suggestions for this policy.

Who We Are

Peri Pakroo—Founder, Publisher & Editor

Outside her work with Pyragraph, Peri is a business author and coach, specializing in creative and smart strategies for self-employment and small business. Her focus is on helping people build structure for their passions to find success on their own terms. Peri is the author of several books on small business and nonprofit start-ups including The Small Business Start-Up Kit, The Women’s Small Business Start-Up Kit and Starting & Building a Nonprofit, all published by Nolo. She has played in a number of bands including the blurts, Bellemah, The Directory and her own downer country project, Peri & the FAQs.

In 2012, Peri saw the need for a resource featuring the voices of a wide range of creative workers and the many different career paths they take. She founded Pyragraph to fill this need. Here’s the Pyragraph start-up story.

Eva Avenue—Founding Editor, Creative Director

Eva Avenue works daily in the fields of art, music and journalism. She has lived in Amsterdam, Portugal, France, Florida, New Mexico, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and Seattle. She sits at Zen centers and takes ballet on the side.

Javier Romero—Technology Manager

Besides developing apps like Hangerang, Javier has been recording under the name Strange Magic for over 10 years in a manner as minimally DIY as one can get away with. In an earlier life he shared the stage with folks like Beirut, Superdrag, and The Breeders to name a few. His music has been compared to Elvis Costello, Brian Wilson, and Wilco in the past. You can find Strange Magic on Bandcamp.