Statement of Purpose: This Is Not A Food Blog
This is “Beyond the Caption,” a blog of things that need more than a few sentences of text to do them justice. I love captions for context, but I need more depth in my daily writing. My website is full of captions, and so are my facebook and instagram pages. It seems like the only thing that isn’t overly captioned these days are online recipes. Recipes seem to have chapters of text before you even find the recipe instructions. I find this odd because the last thing that needs paragraphs are recipes which should be clear and concise. I feel like if I dedicate the same amount of time and energy to challenging topics that recipe bloggers dedicate to describing food, maybe I can achieve something as fulfilling as dinner.
A few years ago a student who followed me on social media asked me to start a blog. She was fascinated by all of the traveling that I was doing and wanted to learn more. I took the request to heart and started a wordpress blog, but I only got a few posts deep. As it turns out when your job is your life, you can’t make blogging a priority. I didn’t mind not having a life when I loved my job because that just meant that I loved my life! It was when my job evolved away from becoming a career and towards a series of ethical conundrums that I didn’t have the professional dexterity to navigate that I realized that I needed to refocus. I loved the people I worked with and for, and it was really hard to move on from something that I invested in with 12 years of passion and energy. Leaving my job was like turning down chocolate cake, it was an amazing experience, but I can’t ethically support the chocolate trade and it wasn’t good for me. Here I go, already talking about food!
Here I am, home, and not just because of the pandemic. I applied for jobs that interested me, but they didn’t work out. For some reason it is hard to market yourself as an introvert, bad ass, artist, world traveler, with a rock solid moral code, and a passion for social justice when you live in rural Indiana. Instead, I am doing what is probably for the best… making art my career and getting more engaged in my community. I am really excited about how to bring these two things together, and I hope to document how this all unfolds. There will be some challenging topics, beautiful images, and many stories. This blog will give you and in-depth, and possibly out of your comfort zone look at where I have been, what I have learned, and things I have made. Who knows, maybe I will even throw in the occasional unnecessarily wordy recipe for a laugh. Enjoy!
