My main interest is in connecting other people, especially children, to art, to making art, to place, and to our history. Besides printmaking and publishing the Outer Coast calendar of art and poetry, I design theater sets, and I'm working in history, historic preservation, and teaching children things like art, theater, and literature at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp and in the schools.Over the past few years I have been working to record the oral history of Sheldon Jackson School and College on video, first to document the recent history and its disastrous end, leading back to the complicated and important story of its origin as a mission school for Alaska Native children, in 1878.An art installation in 2013 was an exhibit without words; in 2014 I won a Rasmuson Fellowship, for turning this into a film. I'm now researching and writing a book about the school.Art, writing, and teaching are about discovery. Good teachers don't give their students information, they immerse students in quality work, inspiring them to stretch, work, create for themselves. We don't retain information that has been handed to us but must discover it for ourselves. In my own art and writing, I want to allow the audience to engage with ambiguity and contradictions, to come to their own understanding. Because I've seen what good teachers can do, I'm passionate about sustaining quality public education, against the forces of privatization that put profits ahead of good teaching.In historic preservation, I managed grants to restore the Japonski Island Boathouse with the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society (where I'm still on the board), and recently for the Sitka Fine Arts Camp for restoring the historic Sheldon Jackson Campus.In early 2020 we launched Voices of Sheldon Jackson School and College, a website (at sjvoices.org) and a series of eight interpretive signs guided by former staff and students, especially Alaska Native graduates.