Who Is This Guy?

In a nutshell:

Michael Jarmer is a writer, teacher, musician, podcaster, actor, and speaker. Retired from teaching English Language Arts after 33 years in public schools, he’s now eager to help others, in a more personal way, reach their creative and developmental goals.

The bonus material, in first person: 

My name is Michael Jarmer. I am a recently retired teacher of English Language Arts from a public high school in Milwaukie, Oregon. I liked teaching. I liked it enough to keep doing it for 33 years and I am exceedingly happy that I was able to retire before I reached anything like burnout. I think it’s a rewarding profession, but I’m worried on many fronts, and I’ve been blogging about that as long as I’ve been blogging, and will probably continue to do so. In my next and continuing professional life, I am a freelance writer, a writing coach, a fiction writer, a poet and musician. I’ve self-published a novel through iUniverse. It’s called Monster Talk. You can purchase a copy right here:

http://bookstore.iuniverse.com/Products/SKU-000540201/Monster-Talk.aspx.

or, rather, skip the middle man and buy a copy directly from me at

https://www.herecomeseverybody.com

In April of 2013, I participated in the National Poetry Writing Month by writing a poem a day for a month and publishing each of them here on the blog.  After the 30 days, I kept at it, inside and outside of NaPoWriMo, and I got into the habit of numbering my poems here, only to distinguish them from the prose.  While it is not my form, and while I have no sense about how good I am at it, poetry allows me to blog about almost anything under the sun–so I think I will continue–after all, it has yielded, as of this writing, a little more than 400 poems.

I find I have become over the last decade or so very much interested in meditative practices, mindfulness, formation work, inner work, what I would call secular spirituality. One of the key projects of my adult life, running parallel with my introduction to and now deep involvement with The Center for Courage and Renewal, is that I have tried to live and work with more integrity, bringing into deeper harmony WHO I AM with WHAT I DO, what Parker J. Palmer calls the marriage between soul and role. So, I’m blogging about all that stuff as well under the banner “Mindfulness Practice.” And in recent years I have become certified as a Courage and Renewal facilitator–so we can ad that to this list of stuff I will continue to do professionally in my “retirement.”

Last year I started a podcast called “The Book I Read” about, you guessed it, books that I was reading. The text of those podcasts can be found under the menu item of the same name. I hope to continue doing that work as a self-motivator to read more and as a way to share that joy of reading with others.

I’m the lyricist, singer, and principle percussionist in the Portland piano pop band called Here Comes Everybody. As that musical endeavor turned 30 in 2016, I started blogging about that musical history. You could learn more about the band by visiting the website: http://www.herecomeseverybody.com. I’ve also been writing live music reviews from time to time, (see Well, That Was Mostly Fun, Wasn’t It? and Concert Review Confessions: St. Vincent at the Keller Auditorium). Sometimes I’m just generally musing on music (see Some Things That Sucked About Music in the 80s). But finally, I’ve embarked on this strange and ridiculously ambitious series, Notes Toward A Musical Autobiography, in which I write about every artist or band represented in my cd collection in alphabetical order, a project that I am doubtful about ever being able to finish.

Maybe focus is key in the blogosphere, but, given this range of interests and limited time for multiple and variously specified blog projects, everything will most likely continue to hang under the same proverbial roof. And if there’s something in particular you’d like me to blog about, please let me know. I’d take that kind of thing pretty seriously, and if I felt I could do it, I would. That’s all for now. Thanks for visiting and reading!

Michael

p.s.: The photo of me on this page and others, the ones that look like they were done professionally, were taken by Miri Stebivka unless otherwise noted. Check out his stuff at Mirifoto.