Introduction and Bio: Ryan Knutson
My name is Ryan. I grew up in a medium-size town near Sacramento, California. First and foremost, I am a person. I am affected by the things I see and experience on a daily basis, the suffering and the overwhelming grief that is all around us. I am a civil rights lawyer by day and, as such, I write legal for a living. But lately, something has been burning within me in a way I haven’t quite felt before.
I have been writing since I was around 10-years old. I wrote back then because I was compelled to. There was a fire within me that had been kindled and burning since my earliest memories, a yearning to heave something out of me and to record it for what it was. I needed to understand and try to express the things that were happening around me, the loss, the chaos, the emotions, the general upheaval of early days. Small things, meditations, thoughts, dreams.
I would write them down in a red spiral notebook, spend my time inside and then, having let myself flow out onto the page for a long while, I would seal those notebooks away in a drawer, to be picked up again whenever my thoughts and ideas became too much to hold in. I wrote in much this way for years. I would journal and write short stories. I kept this habit up until college and law school. Then I stopped. I would write on an infrequent basis. I was seemingly too busy to sit down and focus on anything other than work and studying. I studied and had no time.
The act of writing to document things happening around me, to express what I thought, and to illuminate people, their intentions, their motivations, their lives and their hearts, became too costly to my overburdened self. I lost family and things fell apart. My career started and took off. I didn’t look back.
But life has a way of catching up to you when you least expect it. And lately, that burning sensation, always present, that I was too busy to listen to has come roaring back. I can’t shake the need to document things, to open myself up, to talk about the things I see, to discuss the world and its people, to illuminate people and who they are, to talk about America and it’s suffering. I can’t shake that need. And I don’t want to.
So I am happy to be here on this journey with all of you.
Send me an email. Always happy to chat — [email protected]
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