About
I’m a journalist, editor, photographer, and graphic designer currently based in strange but beautiful San Francisco. Originally, I was born in Poland, in an equally strange but beautiful place called Szepietowo. Unlike Fog City, the home of jazz, street art and beat poets, Szepietowo had no artists or poets. In fact, most forms of public self-expression had been put into hibernation after the second world war. Poland could be a dreary place back then, but it made us appreciate the small things with an intensity very few can understand. The anticipation of eating an orange, a fruit so exotic and rare, we only ate it on Christmas Eve. The absolute awe of seeing someone in a new pair of Levis. I still remember vividly the excitement of eating my first banana.
You couldn’t buy such things in Poland back then. There were a lot of things we couldn’t do. Certain kinds of music, hair styles, even architecture was forbidden. The government literally controlled every aspect of your life. So we did the hardest thing any family could do. We left everything behind. We packed light and drove through the mountains into Traiskirchen, a small town just outside of Vienna, primarily known for its refugee camp. Our new home.
In Traiskirchen we lived in a large gym-sized room full of strangers, and we weren’t allowed to leave. The room was lined with bunk beds, and piles upon piles of suitcases. We were poor and totally alone but the air around us was full of promise. It was an experience you knew would hurt every step of the way, but you did it because it would eventually pay off. Or at least, you hoped it would.
I didn’t learn to read until I was nine years old, and by that time I had lived in half a dozen homes and attended four different schools in three different countries. The moment I learned Polish, I had to learn German, and the moment I mastered that we moved to Canada where I had to learn English, then French. Beyond languages, I don’t think I learned a single thing in the first eleven years of my life.
The stars were perfectly aligned for me to fail. I didn’t have to do anything special to make it happen, I just had to let the natural trajectory of my life continue as it always had. But for some reason, I didn’t.
It’s incredible the kinds of things you could learn on your own – I learned calligraphy and illustration, I learned to differentiate between a white-tailed deer and an elk, I learned how to use a camera and I learned what it takes to write a really good story. Hemingway taught me how to fight, Dostoyevsky how to forgive, and Sartre made me realize that none of it really mattered anyway. I learned that luck was made of grit, and that happiness could be found in the smallest of places – tucked between the pages of a book, captured in a photograph, weaved into a poem or embossed onto a piece of paper.
Those early years taught me that bookstores were often warmer than classrooms, that kindness was more important than competition, that winning someone over was more rewarding than winning the race, and that you can accomplish anything you want as long as you have the right people in your corner.
