“Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.”

— Edward Albee, The Zoo Story

As a high school senior, I had no idea what to pursue after graduation. The pressure to go to college was high to the point of inevitability, but nothing in my small-town academic career sparked a fire in me. Most of my time outside of school was spent making music with my bandmates* and acting at my local community theater, so in hindsight, a path toward the arts seems painfully obvious. Unfortunately, as so many young aspiring artists often do, I succumbed to the age-old bad advice that paychecks would be too few and far between to make a living.

“You need a backup plan!” I heard that phrase so often in high school, I started to think it was our fight song. Even guidance counselors, the trusted sages of all passages forward, echoed the refrain on the regular. Did it never occur to anyone that focusing solely on your “backup plan” made it Plan A? It sadly didn’t occur to young me. After backing my way into a regional state school, my pursuit of a backup plan predictably sputtered and flamed out.

Not long after my premature exit, I found my footing in Pittsburgh, doing a number of monotonous office jobs, selling various products, subscriptions, and memberships that I adeptly learned about on the fly. With each new role, my ability to shape persuasive narratives into satisfied sales quotas landed me higher up corporate hierarchies, but my lack of a degree consistently fixed a hard cap just under the top rung of every ladder.

A few years down the road, and newly married, my wife and I packed up our Pittsburgh apartment and headed for the Midwest. Almost as soon as we crossed the Chicago Skyway, opportunities for reinvention seemed endless and everywhere. My daily bike commute from Lakeview to the Gold Coast filled me with a confident energy that I had never felt before.The time had come to break through the doubt and hesitation and reach for my degree. I ended up with two.

My journey back began in 2008 at DePaul University, where I enrolled in a BA program with a focus on Interpersonal Communication. If my years in service and sales had prepared me for anything, it was understanding how people connected with one another, how we related our stories and life experiences to find common ground and explore new ways of thinking–which is also to say, how to be persuasive. Diving into every learning opportunity DePaul offered, both on-campus and abroad in the UK, I discovered myriad world-opening perspectives that enriched my knowledge and completely reframed my skill set. Through that enlightening exposure, I finally found my passion: storytelling.

While finishing my undergraduate degree, I applied to Columbia College Chicago’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. My 4.0 GPA at DePaul and my polished writing portfolio earned me one of two Follett Merit Awards, which covered the entire cost of the master’s program. Over the next three years, my expertise in all forms and genres of storytelling took root. When I seized an opportunity for a graduate teaching assistantship, I tutored, taught classes, and ran story workshops for all ages from elementary school through college. Many of my students came from schools with grossly under-resourced arts programs—if they had them at all. Filling those gaps in opportunity was challenging, but deeply rewarding. With each spark of confidence that lit in the eyes of a young writer, I uncovered yet another passion: passing the power of storytelling to others.

Earning my MFA in 2016 was a pinnacle achievement I couldn’t have imagined as an uninspired high school senior. Looking back now, thirty years from the start, I can attest that the thousands of miles spent going “out of the way” were precisely necessary to my story. The detour yielded knowledge and degrees, but the richest reward came in the form of a passion for storytelling that I now get to share with each up-and-coming student in search of their own correct way.

*Pass The Peasants. Don’t look for us. We were mercifully pre-socials.