Clay is my first language. I love the immediacy of it — the way a mark stays, the way a child’s hand leaves something permanent. I work in ceramics, gel printing, photography, and poetry, and they all feed each other. But clay is where I come home. There is nothing like pressing your hands into the earth and making something that will outlast you — and watching someone else discover that for the first time. I have a passion community art making as a healing tool.

The river I grew up on. My sons. My mother, still making art at eighty. My father, who spent his life fighting for the Klamath River and witnessed the dams come down before he died. The 350 children who pressed their hands into clay this year to welcome the salmon home. Grief. The beetle trail on a stick my son brought me from the river. The shadow I cast on every beach I’ve ever stood on. The moment someone discovers they are an artist.

It would mean paying myself — finally — to do the work I’ve given away for years. Time in my studio. Resources for The Fish Remember, a ceramic community mural I’m building with 350 children to honor the return of salmon to the Klamath River. But mostly it would mean treating my own creative life as the vital thing I know it to be — and continuing to use art the way I always have, as a path toward healing for myself and the communities I serve.