My FoCo Fellowship

Roughly a year and a half ago, I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, to write.

It was a circuitous route to that moment in a rather topsy-turvy couple of years. In the summer of 2022 I went to Santa Fe for a week to do a weeklong conference at St. John's College (the Summer Classics program -- highly recommended, by the way.), and I hoped to begin working on a book idea I had, The Punk on Walden Pond, that I've been mentioning over the past year. It started with a short magazine piece for PopMatters and then became a conference paper delivered at the MPCA conference. Well, I did a fair bit of writing, but also just soaked up the arts scene in Santa Fe, ... and at the end of the summer I began looking for another writing opportunity, specifically a fellowship year.

So, the year of 2022-23 became kind of interesting when I discovered a couple fellowships and actually made it rather far in the process. Ultimately, while on Spring Break in Boston in March of '23, I learned the fellowship wasn't going to happen -- an opportunity that would have required an "early-ish" retirement from teaching. So, I rescinded my retirement plans, but the bug of an idea had been planted. And, then, on a little beach on the southern tip of Paros in the Mediterranean at a small cafe watching the sunset and sipping a fair amount of wine, I told my wife I wanted to wrap up my teaching career and pursue my book idea at an MFA program in Creative Writing. 

Needless to say, the 2023-24 school year was an interesting one that ultimately did not end with my admission to an MFA program, but did conclude with my retirement from teaching after thirty-two years in the classroom and school administration. Interestingly, about that time, I had begun a rather unexpected but engaging freelance music writing gig for Westword Magazine, Denver's alt-weekly. With no firm plans for our next step, my wife and I made a fortuitous trip to Fort Collins, CO, for FoCoMX, the "biggest little music festival in America," and that pretty much set our course. 

In FoCo, home to a thriving music scene and also the location of Colorado State University, I embarked on what I've been calling "my FoCo Fellowship," a year or so to immerse myself in my writing and my art and hopefully produce something worthwhile as part of what I deemed "The Walden Punk Project." The fall of '24 was actually a bit precarious and discombobulated for a variety of reasons, and I didn't really get a handle on what I was doing here. But after a warm and rejuvenating winter break with my family, I returned to CSU's Morgan library in early January (January 6 to be exact), and I pursued my writing and art project in earnest. 

Now, I am happy to announce that I have produced a decent first draft of a book about Henry Thoreau and the punk rock ethos, "viewing Thoreau through a punk lens while exploring punk's Thoreauvian roots." I am hoping to spend the spring putting a few chapters out there as journal or magazine articles and then begin pitching publishers on a book proposal. And, I will begin looking for my next gig on the East Coast where my wife and I will be moving in the summer of 2026. 

It's been a kind of wild and ultimately wonderful year during my "fellowship" in the cool, quirky, and quaint town of Fort Collins, and I'll be looking forward to whatever comes next.

Happy New Year.