Imagination Consultant
I’ve been working as an Artist-Educator for over three decades. I’ve held artist-in-residencies internationally, in California, Barcelona, and Amsterdam, nationally in British Columbia, Alberta, Nova Scotia and Ontario, and locally in my hometown of Kingston, Ontario. As an Imagination Consultant, I offer Song, Story & Sound workshops and concert performances in schools everywhere.
In my life as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University, I have the privilege of working with educators and teacher educators who share my passion and endless fascination with the astonishing worlds of children. Of course the children I work and play with don’t know (or care) I have a PhD, nor should they. When I join them in their classrooms, I’m just an unabashed Singer & Song-maker with a blue guitar who can rhyme pretty much anything with anything.
Song, Story & Sound
Song, Story & Sound. These three words are pretty much all I need in my ‘Elevator Pitch’ to describe what I do for a living. More importantly and even more profoundly, they offer a way for me to begin to talk about what matters most in my life. It’s less a case of what I do for a living and more a case of what I do when I’m (really) living: Song, Story & Sound.
In addition to being nicely alliterative, Song, Story & Sound offer wonderful windows into worlds of imagination and possibility. Yet it’s here in the charged space that exists in and in between Song, Story & Sound that one encounters a conundrum-of-sorts. While the breezy elevator pitch might come off without a hitch, the Tedtalk threatens to bog down with the weight of expectations.
If the writer’s maxim, Show don’t tell is a bumper sticker and Attention: Artists at Work is a highway sign, I might be well advised to proceed with caution when attempting to articulate just what Song, Story & Sound mean to my life and to my work.
Perhaps the ‘simple’ elevator pitch requires several trips—both up and down—in order to provide a satisfactory account of what a life lived in Song, Story & Sound both involves and requires.
Yes, that’s it: the categories themselves may be neat and tidy—simple—but how to describe the ways I bring them to classrooms, campfires and cafés, well that’s a different tune … and a longer story.
Better bring in an Imagination Consultant ...
‘Sounds Like’ Series
The ‘Sounds Like’ Series represents the heart of what I do as an imagination consultant. For almost 30 years, I’ve provided concerts, workshops and artist-in residence experiences for schools, libraries, various groups and organizations, camps, festivals, and basically everywhere that students and children and families gather.
Song, Story & Sound are the magic ingredients that come together and apart in my work and play as an artist-educator. From songwriting workshops to storytelling sessions to the creation of soundscapes to interactive concerts, I help students create and ‘capture’ their work in the form of audio archives.
These workshops and performances are always changing and morphing to suit the context in which they take place. Currently, in the midst of a pandemic, in-person workshops have necessarily shifted to virtual formats which, in turn, are leading to the creation of a series of what I’m calling, ‘Sounds Like’ podcasts that will include,
Sounds like Family
Sounds like Classrooms
These song, story & sound podcasts will feature conversations with artists and educators, and, of course, with children as we discuss their projects and creative (ad)ventures. Our focus will be on the creative process involved in bringing songs, stories, poems, spoken word, and ‘found sound’ to life.