Our Story

Our Founder:

Woody the Dog was the most famous canine in Ketchikan, Alaska. He even hosted his own radio show Chew the Bone with Dr. Woody, where he dished out poignant and cosmic advice to problem pets and the people who lived with them. Woody was my medicine wheel for seven years. Then one day he wandered into the Alaskan woods, never to be seen again. He was a great sage and a clown prince of dogs.

My Story:

The best part of my early life was my initials: WAS. I inscribed them everywhere: in the dirt, on park benches, front doors, wet concrete and chalkboards. Most people called me Wassy.

In high school I met my first mentor, my high school English teacher, Don Bunger. Don was a master of nonlinear abstraction. I took five of his classes, each one a revelation. From him I learned how to read Faulkner and to build simulation models out of old car parts; I learned Taoism, science fiction and the wisdom of the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

Don’s room 261 was a mythic land of non-ordinariness in a sequential and conformist world. An abandoned  bees nest and William Blake poems hung from the lights of room 261. Construction paper half covered the clock. On the wall, photos of Greek art, the cockpit of a 747 and deep forest nature scenes. A sandbox sat in front of the chalkboard. The chairs were assembled into an organic random circular form. Books were everywhere.

The first day he told us, “I’m not the teacher here. You are.” Don was the first magician I ever met. He opened a magic door into the realm of creativity; a door that changed my life. To him I am eternally grateful.

In college I learned the art of debauchery and paradoxically got a degree in accounting.

And as a CPA, though I went into hiding in a business suit and rode elevators in downtown Seattle and sat in boxes working numbers, I never forgot room 261 or the calling of the woods from my Alabama childhood. That calling led me to Alaska. The accounting firm had clients up in rural villages in Alaska and I told them to send me there. So there I was on the back deck of the Alaskan State Ferry, surrounded by Deadheads and my audit bags, heading into a fourteen-year initiation adventure.

Alaska’s gourmet air and water knocked me between the eyebrows. I worked in a Tlingit town called Saxman three miles from Ketchikan and lived with Woody the Dog in a little red cabin on the ocean with no insulation or running water. I threw my watch into the ocean.

In Saxman I began working with the elders and helped create a cultural tourism village. We built a tribal house, carving center and a gift store. They called me the White Raven and adopted me into the tribe. I hired every teenager in the village and after a few years, Saxman became the most successful native tourism attraction in Alaska.

I left the formal business world and became a poet, a photographer, a radio DJ, actor and director in the theater and began to mess around with video. I lived at Shakri-La, a wizard’s hut on the sea, by a waterfall in the forest. For seven years I slept between two bodies of water, the falls hissing through the forest and the ocean lapping against the rocky sand. Those waters did something to me. Nature became the guru, the lover, the mentor and the tormentor. Everyday I lived a poem.

Eventually it became time to reenter my ailing American culture and see what I could do about it as an artist. I moved back to Seattle and took a job at Pyramid Communications, a social cause PR firm in Seattle, where I started their film department and made over 40 films for foundations and non-profits. While there I walked into a girl’s high school gym and over the next seven years The Heart of the Game came to life and became my life.

Currently, I live on a house barge called Circus Dog in Seattle, dance tango a lot, and am learning to play music. I look forward to telling more stories of love and compassion during this most precipitous time in our earth’s orbit.

Love Works,

-Wassy

>> For more formal bio (click here)