I went back and started working on adding nails to boards and grain to the wood. She would often look at something and acknowledge my effort but then put it back to me to decide whether or not  I was satisfied with the outcome, rather than if she was. It has led to me taking a mindful approach to how I construct art, photography, and writing projects.”
“I love photography because I a lot of control over the process and outcome – I know exactly what I am looking at, how I’m framing it, and can envision the end result more easily. I am the same when I paint or draw. I often draw in pen because I love the exactness. I’ve tried abstract art and I can’t just embrace chaos. If I paint a splat, it takes me hours to create it with careful brush-strokes until I feel it’s right – which is the opposite of what abstract is supposed to be! But I need that control and exactness to my work.
One thing I love about writing is that I have a lot of control over how I craft the story and construct the concepts. Building a story, developing the characters, the conflict, and symbolism is like paint-strokes that allow me the creativity to explore things much more in-depth than one picture ever could.
My mother minored in English and while we were young she always stressed the importance of reading, and being able to convey ideas through writing. She was always trying to get me into reading, and it just wasn’t taking. I sat on a couch for eight hours once, refusing to read. Then, one day in fourth grade, I had my tonsils out. While I was a captive audience my mother read a story about a man stranded in the desert. My Aunt Linda was a head-librarian and had picked out a couple of titles she thought I might like while I was recovering.
The writing was very rich, I could imagine every detail of the story. When things were getting good, she would just stop and hand me the book and excuse herself to do something else. Of course I was intrigued and started reading ahead. It was very crafty of her!
Before long I was reading all kinds of books. My friend Aric and I were so avid we would get in trouble in class for hiding books in our laps and reading while the class was working on assignments we had already finished.

In college I was in an English-Lit class, and most of the people in this class were a few years older than me, as I had a lot of college English credit from taking dual credit English classes in High-School. The class was given the challenge of writing a short story that invoked emotion. I wrote about my horse, who had given birth and the foal had fallen into the nearby stream and died. I wrote it partly from my perspective and partly from the mare’s.
When it came time for peer review of our final drafts, my copy was put in the hands of the class and I nervously waited as these older more experienced classmates read my piece. As I shifted in my seat the most amazing thing happened –  I started hearing this sound all over the room. I looked around and I was shocked to find that nearly every woman in the room, and a couple of the guys, had teared up or were straight up crying their eyes out reading my piece.

It was an amazing experience to see something I had written move another person to tears. What a sacred power writers have.”
Brent started exploring creative writing in college but never considered writing professionally. He revisited his passion for writing when he published his first work during the COVID lockdown of 2020 – dusting off a shelved short story and adapting it into a full-length novel. Similar to the many sketches and partially completed paintings in his studio, Brent has many book ideas in various stages of the creative process, and he looks forward to publishing many more works in the future.