I once had the honor of being called “the least pretentious person” a friend had ever met, but I am now handing over the crown to Autumn. When you meet her it’s like hanging out with an old friend, she immediately puts you at ease, as does her writing. Neither of us planned to create a Pride portrait during Pride Month, we both just sort of fell into it, and I’m so proud to share her story:

There was a very strange moment recently when Dylan texted the family group chat and said “Your news story was excellent!!! So proud of you!!!” Iain texted, “Cool, thanks for watching it.” She replied, “Was talking to Mummy.”

Jared happened upon the I Am More exhibit earlier this year at NorthShore Mall, and after recognizing our former mayor of Gloucester, stopped to read the essays. He sent me a quick note, saying it was “quite wonderful,” and after looking him up I was embarrassed to see he was a professional portrait photographer who regularly contributes to The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. He asked if he could pitch a story to NorthShore Magazine about the project and soon enough he was in our yard taking photos of me for the April article. I noticed a black shiny object on the side of his head, and he admitted that the reason he connected so much with the exhibit was because of the struggles he had gone through with hearing loss. I immediately wanted to learn more and soon enough the tables were turned and I was in his studio hearing his story:

On Sunday Iain and I got in our second home, the UHaul van, and traveled to South Shore Plaza to pick up the I Am More exhibit, brought it back to the Paint Factory, unloaded, re-loaded a different I Am More exhibit and drove it to Burlington Mall, where we unloaded after closing and set up a new exhibit! Then we got stuck in road construction on the way home and staggered to bed.

Today we recover from a 12-hour day of moving the exhibit across the state. It began at 7:30 am with the key lockbox at UHaul frozen shut. My husband had just been on an 18-day expedition in the Sea of Cortez, working from dawn to dusk on the water, flew home to a three-hour time difference PLUS Daylight Savings Time, loaded up new portraits at the Paint Factory in howling cold winds, and now we stood at a frozen lockbox.

When I was in my twenties I learned that hair could be donated to make wigs for children with alopecia. I didn’t know anything about the disease but it seemed like an easy enough thing to do, so I did it multiple times. If I had bothered to learn about alopecia I might have understood that a wig was not the easy bandaid I thought was. Erin taught me about the challenges and complexity of living without hair and the impacts we couldn’t even imagine:

It’s been too long since a certain little face has been in my life and I needed to change that.

Way back in 2020 the fourth of five regional exhibits of I Am More: Massachusetts was scheduled to be hosted at UMass Amherst to serve western Massachusetts, but we all know how that ended (Covid, if you don’t), so moving on. Here we are two years later and Iain and I have just installed the Western Massachusetts Regional Exhibit of I Am More: Massachusetts at…The Holyoke Mall at Ingleside!

The last I Am More exhibit before the pandemic was The Northshore Mall in Peabody, Massachusetts. It came about because I needed a location for the North Shore Regional Exhibit of I Am More: Massachusetts. It needed to be BIG with lots of PEOPLE in order to have the greatest impact, so I did what any professional event planner does and opened up Google Maps for the north shore, looked for the biggest dot on the map, and declared it the host.

It’s time to unveil some work I did over the holiday, squeezed in between new I Am More portraits. None of these were on my radar at the start of December, but by Christmas everything fell into place.