Peri Here

Please forgive me for taking until now to announce that in May 2020 I hired Lisa Barrow as Editor, and I could not be more stoked to have her as my very first employee!

The most important detail for you to be clear about is who is in the audience. How much did they pay to get into the event? Say, for an art competition, who are the participants: adults from a local correctional facility or high school students? You’ll want to cater your talk to their perspective.

Mainly what I’d say to my friend is this: Imagine a world where there is a free beer tap on every corner. If you want to make a living selling beer, how can you succeed? One inescapable part of the answer, it seems to me, is that you end up giving away a LOT of beer.

I’ll be honest, the simple act of listing what we’ve accomplished makes me feel pretty great and makes me excited to contemplate what we’ll achieve in the coming year and years beyond that. Because, to continue being honest, I feel a palpable feeling of overwhelm.

That’s right, Trump says John Lewis is all talk and no action or results. To even repeat that line on Martin Luther King Jr. Day makes me feel stabby.

Creative folks have a special and incredibly important role in, and power to affect, social change. While the actual levers of political power may be in the wrong hands at the moment, artists and creatives have immense social and cultural power. Yes, this means you! YOU have power to reach hearts and minds, often in ways that politicians and campaigners cannot, and never will be able to.

We’ll see how far I make it into gearheadery, but this I can tell you: An important part of deciding to get more hands-on with media production is simply accepting the inescapable fact that there’s no quick-and-easy way to do this kind of creative work.

It did feel kind of insane to continue pushing a start-up forward from a room in a pediatric bone marrow transplant unit.

I tend to find articles about diet and exercise incredibly boring, so I thought I’d offer my tips along with some advice I found in Jayne’s Almanac 1937.

Balancing music with needing to put my daughter first is tricky. I have to admit, there’s something about playing music that feels self-indulgent.