It's about damn time!

Jonathan Pazer's main wall as of April 2022 at the Mendocino Coast Photographers Gallery, Fort Bragg, CA

It's August 19th of 2022 about eleven years since I put my first photo collage up at a craft fair in Albany, New York, because I was making images and I wanted to share them. A few years after that, I got back to writing poetry after having to squeeze in a long hiatus of lawyering, fathering, and husbanding.

So it's about time that I embodied my decade of change in an update to my venerable website. As of today, it's probably still riddled with typos that even AutoCorrect cannot cure (because dyslexia) or perhaps ones that AutoCorrect has made worse--we all know how that goes. 

In looking back it is interesting to gain some perspective on my various accomplishments and transformations. The convergence of my poetry and photography as things that feed one another is the most remarkable for me. It was my insight back in 2016, while I was working toward my solo show at Roost Gallery in New Paltz, NY that my process for titling my photographs was more or less the same process I followed for writing poetry, I would go to a place in my mind or the place in the picture and look around and see what was there and then write about it. The result of this insight was my first chapbook, and a very cohesive gallery show, based on a series of poems all written for a related series of abstract images.

I'm happy to have poetry more present in my life, and after moving to Mendocino California from Gardiner, New York with my wife Andrea McFarland, who's both a painter and a writer, we've begun to settle down into the pandemic world of uncertainty.
 
So it is that today I'm a member of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast, an area-based writers' group where I regularly participate in a poets' writing group, and a poets' reading group and monthly meetings of the entire group over Zoom. These organized poetry activities have been a fun way to experience my new California community.

Meanwhile back in Fort Bragg, CA at the Mendocino Coast Photographers Gallery, I have space to show my latest photography, driftwood sculptures and display my poetry book. What's on the wall at the gallery changes as things sell and are replaced or not and also by what's new that I've printed. So keep coming around.

I'm still adding images to the website and I'm going to add some poems to the poetry blog and we'll have to see how it goes. So keep an eye out and see you around at the gallery some time.

Jonathan Pazer
South Caspar, Mendocino, CA
Aug. 19, 2022