Most of what goes wrong in organizations, neighborhoods, and relationships gets blamed on the people standing in the middle of it. I think the interesting question is almost always one layer back: what is the structure actually producing, and who is taking the rap for it. That question is what the writing here is about. It shows up in buildings, in rules, in how people end up in rooms together or don't.
I grew up homeschooled on a farm in rural Minnesota, skipped high school, started college early through PSEO, and had an associate's a couple years later. Along the way I got into student government and figured out two things I'm still grateful for: that I did not want to be an engineer, and that calculus and I were never going to get along.
Then I followed a girlfriend to Minneapolis, maybe the third or fourth time I'd ever been in a city that size. After I'd moved in, the few people I knew there scattered, and then my phone broke, so I spent a good while navigating off a laptop on my passenger seat. I enrolled at the biggest nonprofit trade school in the upper Midwest. The whole time I'd been buying and selling cars and car parts, and I kept at it across the Cities. I lived by the U of M, then the Westside of St. Paul, then South St. Paul, then Como. For a stretch I delivered pizza on campus on the night shift. Between the cars and the pizza and the constant moving, I met an absurd range of people, every age and income and background, a few streets I probably had no business being on. I didn't know it at the time, but what I was learning was that the rooms people end up in shape how they act far more than anything they walked in with.
Late in 2019 I flew to Spain and used real public transit for the first time, trains and a metro that just worked, and I spent the rest of the trip noticing how the city was put together. The next summer I interned at a building-science and enclosure-engineering firm, and I think two of us in the whole place didn't have a PE behind our name.
Out of school I landed in Fargo doing federal construction, work that put me on the ground across most of the country. Since 2021 it's been forty states and DC, three countries if you count back to that Spain trip. 2023 was the peak: in the first half alone I averaged about fifty-seven hours a week, had one week of eighty-five, and put something like fifty thousand miles on the year.
I also got way out over my skis. I talked my way into a greenfield development starting with two houses in Moorhead that had to be physically moved because the Red River flood diversion was being cut right through where they sat. My then-fiancee and I bought a house in Fargo, trusted the best inspector in town, opened a wall, and the whole thing came apart. I ended up rebuilding nearly every wall on the main floor and nearly every floor in the place. I never lived there. That was the expensive version of the same lesson: the deeper problem was structural, not the people who built it or the inspector who missed it. The incentives that produced a clean report on a bad house were baked into how inspections get bought and sold.
Then the year that actually changed me. After a long relationship ended I faced my own pattern, too many projects and too little time around other people, and picked up dance. Lindy Hop first, bad at it for a long time, then bars and clubs, the kind that has nothing to do with Lindy. I was working seventy-hour weeks on the most broken project I've ever seen in Minot, forty-one of fifty-two weeks above sixty, and learning to dance through the back half of it. In a little over a year I danced in ten cities across eight states and into Canada, everything from Charleston and bachata to rooftop EDM to a barn in rural Manitoba with no cell reception and someone I'd met that day. I was testing whether changing the room would change the person in it. It did, and the fact that it did is most of what I write about: how much of what looks like personality is actually the room you're standing in.
Most of that was built, not found, and built recently. The structure does more of the work than anyone notices. The person gets the credit or the blame, and the thing that actually moved usually isn't either of them.
My essays are arguments, evidence-led attempts to identify what a system is actually producing and who is being blamed for outcomes built into its structure. The Studio works differently. It holds poems, scenes, and constructed pieces drawn from the same obsessions at closer range: buildings, streets, desire, material decay, ordinary rooms, and the strange worlds people make inside larger systems.
The built-environment end of that question, the part someone can hire me for, is the firm, Endure. This page, and everything I write here, is the rest of the person behind it.