Joe's Odyssey

Can you have nostalgia for a place you’ve never been? 

Because I swear Dublin stirs in me something that feels a lot like nostalgia as I ride the bus from the airport through the city center to my hotel near the University College Dublin campus. That feeling only intensifies as I take advantage of a day off to explore the city on foot, first on a long run to the coast and then by wandering the city center.

Why might Dublin evoke this nostalgia in me, someone with no cultural connection to Ireland? It’s a…

On a Friday morning in April, I woke up in England.

Which was a good thing, because I went to sleep Thursday night above the Atlantic Ocean on a flight to London.

On the ground, I successfully found a bus that took me to the campus of the University of Oxford, at which I was to give a talk and then perform my Odyssey the next day as part of a conference called Reworking Epic: Across Time, Media and Cultures.

2024 is a transition year for my classics performance work. The Blues of Achilles is now my primary…

Lately when discussing my Homeric-inspired work with audiences, I've found myself marveling at how beautiful and strange my path has been, marked with luck, mystery, and coincidence.

A lot like all of life.

When I think about my journey now, I feel something I can only describe as wonder. A spiritual sort of wonder. And gratitude. 

My Odyssey show at University of Toronto was the only Odyssey show out of six total performances in Ontario, Canada, the last week of a leap year February. The other five were Blues…

I’ve written before about the transformative experience of reading Homer in Greek for the first time. I got the sense of being in a physical space inside the poetry, surrounded by a living organism.

It’s still among the most connected I’ve ever felt to humanity.

If that was a lightning strike that rewired my brain and heart (and the course of my life), my understanding and appreciation of the world portrayed in the epics has been a decades-long slow burn.

Yes, I sensed right away that a musician/modern bard…

On a frigid late November Tuesday morning, I played my 15th show at or for University of Illinois, Chicago. My first was in the fall of 2016 and this was my third visit in 2023.  It's no exaggeration to say the shallow cinderblock classrooms have become a home of sorts to me, a place I feel comfortable, a place I've discovered how to be myself.

In the fall of 2018, I wrote one post about two shows on back to back days and as I read back through all the words inspired by hometown shows, it was this dispatch…