Do we really need to write in third person here? I guess that’s one way to make sure my name is in the paragraph for SEO… Third person is reserved for YA novels and British monarchs. My name is Jeffrey Johnson, and you can find me online under the handle RedHerringJeff. I’m an illustrator, teacher, storyteller, and sometimes critic.

Okay, most of the time critic.

Okay, I’m a pretty much all the time critic–see above–and that’s rooted in a love of process. “Why?” is the question that all my other questions point to. I like to know how things work. I habitually play with words, phrases, ideas, and images in the made world around me. I deconstruct artifacts. I take things apart–framing, re-framing and sorting their pieces–looking for context and consistency. For me, the word critic evokes an image of a tidy, well ordered office with file cabinets filled with just the right number of organized folders and a simple but very usable card catalog. There’s probably a large desk in the middle of the office, something fine and expensive looking but that doesn’t draw attention to it’s value. On that desk is a blotter paper, and centered on that blotter paper is a typewriter. Because a critic is classy, and not a shlub that wears a faded, sweatshirt, writes on an aging laptop, in Panera because they have free WiFi and free refills of coffee.

The challenge of my role as a teacher is that my critic does not work in that nice office. My critic is a magpie, that collects, sorts, and stores interesting–and uninteresting–things in a manner that’s consistent with Grandpa’s basement. It’s so, (I don’t know if its proper to draw out that so in writing like soooooooo, but that’s what my intent is so please read it that way)…it can be like magic, watching that aging man move through the tools hanging from hooks and piled on benches, and the cartons of ephemera. He knows what each thing is, how it works, where it came from, and how to best us it in a way that it wasn’t intended to be used.

But the route to get to what he’s looking for isn’t always straightforward; and it sometimes involves taking apart several other things in the basement to rebuild into something resembling what he was after.

but better.