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Hi Kristi,

Thanks for being part of this. Kitsap Creative is a zine-style publication for and about the people making things happen creatively in this county — artists, makers, directors, musicians, builders of all kinds.

These questions are yours. Take as much or as little space as you need. There are no wrong answers — just your story in your words.

We’ll share a draft with you before anything goes live.

You advocated for a death row inmate in Alabama. You negotiated deals for Adobe. You created a web series for kids with learning differences. Then you got an MFA and became a poet. That’s not a career arc — that’s a life that keeps answering a different question. What were you looking for across all of it?

Working the Liberty Bay Cafe Closing Shift is set right here — Poulsbo, Liberty Bay, 2am, the bar’s closed, synanthropic wildlife in the parking lot. That poem holds tourists, junkies, a returned steak, and a woman proving she’d beaten her eating disorder in the same frame. How did it come to exist? Were you working that shift, or did you carry someone else’s night home?

That poem doesn’t editorialize. It just stays in the room. Poetry that holds class and addiction without arguing about them is hard to pull off. What’s your instinct about when a poem should make a point and when it should just show up and pay attention?

Autoplay ends with “Oh, Great Box of Blue Light, say / Stay.” You ran Dyslexiaville and the Super d! Show — you’ve spent years thinking about how screens and technology shape young minds. Is that poem a confession, a warning, or both?

You wrote three ekphrastic poems for the Bainbridge Island Poet Laureate Program — responding to Peggy Vanbianchi’s gut-and-found-object sculpture, Sheila Ross’s painting, Jenny Anderson’s clay pilgrim. What happens when you write toward someone else’s art? Does the visual piece give you permission, or does it create a different pressure?

The Lorca poem is essentially about preferring to be alone. “Beholden to nothing and no one / (not you, not teens) / except Tito and the Spanish sun.” How much of your poetry is permission — permission to want what you actually want?

You grew up in farming country, eastern Washington, second-generation immigrant family. Then decades in Seattle. Now Bainbridge. What do you carry from that first landscape?

You’ve spent 25 years working with neurodivergent and twice-exceptional kids — you started support groups, served on the Dyslexic Advantage board, built media for kids who learn differently. Does that work inform how you write? Do poets and kids who think sideways have something in common?

You got your MFA from Eastern Oregon University. What did the degree give you that you couldn’t have gotten on your own, and what did it teach you that school can’t actually teach?

You managed a horse ranch solo with zero experience. You circumnavigated the globe on 19 flight segments. You keep walking into things you have no business doing. Is that a writing instinct or a life instinct?

What are you working on right now? Where is the writing taking you?

What does it mean to you to be writing on this island, in this particular community, right now?

Is there anything we haven’t asked that you’d like to talk about? The floor is yours.