Joe's Odyssey

My friend and excellent Classicist Joel Christensen seems to have a bottomless well of good analogies for framing various aspects of Homeric epic. He's written about them at length over at his website Sententiae Antiquae as well as on Twitter/X. As Homer is very much in the news (yes!) around Emily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad (hooray!) I've been thinking about an analogy of my own. 

Much of the discussion around translations centers around faithfulness to the original text. N.B. this is of course…

νόστος = a return home.

My trip to perform at the 2023 National Junior Classical League convention was a return of sorts: a return to the site of the 2014 convention, Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia.

The 2014 NJCL holds a special significance to me because it coincided with the failing health and passing of my first dog, Hendrix.  I wrote about that experience HERE and I couldn’t help but think about it as I rolled onto campus on a warm summer Sunday to play four shows over three days.  I was staying in…

Before my Monday morning show at BYUI in Rexburg, Idaho, the 47th state in which I’ve performed the Odyssey, the professor and class said a prayer for me.

It was a simple prayer that I might perform well and return home safely.

After the show, to wrap up the discussion, the same professor asked me how performing the Odyssey over the years has made me a better person.

As I drove the three hours south to Salt Lake City for my flight back to Chicago, I thought about these bookends.

I thought about how moved I was…

I had just wrapped a Saturday afternoon performance of the Odyssey in the lunchroom of Easton High School in Easton, Maryland, a small town an hour southeast of Baltimore across the expansive Bay Bridge. The occasion was the Maryland Junior Classical League Convention. 

The show was over three years in the making: I was booked to play the MDJCL in April of 2020 but… well, you know what happened. 

We (the MDJCL chair and I) were able to reschedule my visit for the 2023 MDJCL and with this performance Maryland…

Three years since the acute beginning of the pandemic and I'm finally starting to fully understand its impact on  my work and career.

I think the pandemic diverted me off a potentially damaging framing of my Homeric pieces, something that developed in 2019 when I started to value and pursue them as commodities more than experiences.

Three years later and I think I am in a much healthier place, a place more true to the gift that Homeric epic has been creatively, personally, and (yes) professionally. And I…