About
I was raised in Gresham, Oregon and I’ve spent most my life in the PNW. I currently reside in Grays Harbor, Washington in a small coastal town. I’m a cranberry farmer, an artist, a writer, a photographer, a teacher, a husband and a dad.
My first career was in talk radio and I worked at several stations in Portland until the summer of 2000 when my wife and I moved to a small rural Virginia town. While there, I co-founded an award-winning photography, cinematography, and design company with my friend Aaron Forrester. I also taught photography and cinema studies to students at two private high schools and kept my hand in radio. A few years after the birth of our son we moved back to Oregon to be near our families.
Entrepreneurship runs in the family. After serving with the Navy in World War II, my Grandpa Pegg used a Rolleiflex twin lens camera to photograph new houses being built in his area. Grandma Pegg would take the prints he produced, hand color them, and create postcards to sell to the proud owners of these new houses so they could show off their new home to loved-ones. A few years before passing away, Grandpa passed that camera on to me and it acts as a sacramental connection to the creative legacy I’m proud to be a part of.
Teaching is a major part of my life. After over 25 years of experience I can still remember the first time I saw the flash of realization come over the face of one of my high school film students when he “got” something about the movie, High Noon. Suddenly he wasn’t just excited to be getting away with watching a movie at school, he was actually deciphering the language of cinema. His face, as if in slow motion, went from being entertained, mouth-breathing, to enlightened. The lights were on where previously they were off. That “flash”, be it in photography, graphic arts, cinema studies, chess, literature, philosophy, or history is what I’ve been chasing for myself and for those that I have the privilege of teaching. I believe that as long as I remain open to the world around me and excited about new input, I’ll always be able to draw others in and bring them along on my explorations. I do this by genuinely getting carried away with my interests and telling stories.
In 2021, I graduated from Eastern Oregon University with a Bachelor of Science in Writing and History. My main areas of focus were on literature studies, creative writing, world cinema, and the history of the American West. I continue to develop my interest in all of these fields and practice my visual (and now audio) arts disciplines while homeschooling my son.