A living hall of story and craft
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Against Christianity-as-Nation and the Anti-Christic Costume I have stood in rooms that smelled like frankincense and brand-new carpet and heard the same sentence stitched in different fonts: Christ is King. Sometimes it was a chant, sometimes a caption, sometimes a way to end a conversation before it began. In each case it landed like a … Read more
It’s Not “Protestant Work Ethic” to Care About What You Make The Accusation of Effort It happens in a dozen small ways, usually wrapped in kindness, occasionally laced with smugness. Someone sees you working with focus—sanding a seam no one will see, re-throwing a vessel that’s almost right, rewriting a paragraph that would pass in … Read more
The Mystery of the Disappearing Job Title A few years ago, you could point at the screen and name what you were looking at. “Influencer” meant someone who monetized the soft power of attention; “content creator” meant someone who produced a steady stream of on-platform media to keep that attention fed. These were not slurs … Read more
Hey everyone, Just a quick heads-up — the site will be offline for a short maintenance window starting October 26 at 3am EST as we complete some upgrades. This move will give Ottawa Valley Creations a faster, more stable foundation and allow me to refine how orders are handled behind the scenes. Once everything is … Read more
The Joke That Isn’t a Joke Here’s a hilarity I didn’t order: my long, carefully structured essays about precarity, value, and the quiet violences of “content” get ten times the traffic of my actual handmade work. Google, apparently, is a connoisseur of fury—so long as the fury is arranged in clean paragraphs with descriptive subheads. … Read more
The Paradox of Praise Watch how the compliments fall. A canvas of splattered gesture earns reverence. A field of simplified symbols—a circle that means sun, a line that means horizon—gets laughed off as childish. A 3D-printed trinket is hailed as sleek and modern; a clay figure with fingerprints still visible is called dated, school-project, “dirty.” … Read more
The Look That Says “Oh, You’re Doing That?” There’s a particular look that crosses a face when someone sees a tip jar on an artist’s page. It isn’t disgust, not exactly. It’s etiquette’s little wince: oh, you’re doing that? As if a line has been crossed—some invisible threshold between “serious creative” and “person who needs … Read more
How influencer culture turned honest labor into performance — and why I refuse to play along. I make things and I sell them. That’s it. This isn’t content; it’s work. Bookmark it if you want to find it again. Subscribe if your bookmarks look as chaotic as mine. The Uneasy Divide I make things. I … Read more
I’m done asking permission to make my work real. Every time I tried to publish a written book, the process stepped between me and the reader like a series of turnstiles: identifiers, registries, catalog entries, platform rules, waiting periods measured in months. Even when the numbers were “free,” time wasn’t. Paper wasn’t. Patience definitely wasn’t. … Read more
I do not want to turn suffering into an icon. I do not want to polish it, frame it, and pretend it ever did me favors. What happened to me was ugly—bloody, raw, body-level harm with the kind of psychic splatter that reaches years into the future. Still, I keep circling the same threshold: my … Read more