Welcome to The Dusty Unknown!
What is The Dusty Unknown? It’s the ancient tomb your Hollywood hero discovered the first time you saw a movie in the theatre. It’s the gravel road you drove down with your best friend on the way to your secret spot. It’s the faint memory of pure imagination that has kept you dreaming. It’s the first trip you took with the love of your life.
What is The Dusty Unknown? It’s the billion particles of moonlight and magic that come together in the deepest recess of your heart. It’s adventure of the highest calling. It’s the x on the map, the buried treasure, the exotic locale.
The Dusty Unknown is your imaginary friend and your inner demons. It is dew-soaked mornings and starless nights. It is first love and last kiss. It is every ounce of self you pour into the making and every wall you build during the fall.
The Dusty Unknown is every nightmare washed away by the morning light. Every smile that formed from the sheer joy of new beginnings. Every book you’ve been lost in. Every query you’ve chased. Every second of wonder that has twinkled in your eyes.
What is The Dusty Unknown? It’s a life given. A wish made. It’s the mad hope that you have something worth saying. It’s giving into the muse and pursuing a creative life. It’s igniting the flame and keeping it lit.
What is The Dusty Unknown? It’s art and the things you sacrifice to make it.
Three years ago, I graduated with my third degree, a late-life ADHD diagnosis, and a longing for something more. Accustomed to the endless stress-cycle of academia, I pondered what life would be like without the constant pressure to excel within the boundaries that someone else imposed. I surmised that if I could simply apply the same level of dedication and determination to literally anything besides my education, I would be hard-pressed to fail. So, I took a part-time job so I might pursue my creative passions with vim and vigor. As it turns out, failure is a necessary ingredient of success—but I am getting ahead of myself.
I have always been an artist. That is to say that I have always been emotional, sensitive, empathic, and observant. Quick to care, easy to hurt, and constantly dreaming, I was the kid who fell in love with the musicians at a concert, repented when I stepped on a spider, and never left a teddybear by itself (so it wouldn’t get lonely). While most kids were only interested in cartoons, I was watching Lorne Greene’s New Wilderness before Thundercats, and The Golden Girls after the Ninja Turtles.
Somewhere in that pop-culture stew, I realized that everything was art; that the design of a mutant turtle named after a renaissance painter was just as remarkable a creation as the one-liners of a blue-haired sitcom legend, and that the majestic curvature of a stalking leopard was more beautiful yet. I didn’t know it at the time, but from that moment on, I would spend the rest of my life creating.
The Dusty Unknown is about honouring, celebrating, and unpacking the creative life. Over the years, as I failed to complete short stories, captured terrible photographs, and abandoned half-finished graphic novels, I met a lot of people like myself. People who were passionate, neurodiverse and, oftentimes, completely alone in their creative process. I hope that The Dusty Unknown can remedy that last bit and be an inclusive space to come together as artists—a place to share the moments that inspire us, the memories that drive us, and the making that keeps us whole while the process tears us apart. But, most of all, I hope The Dusty Unknown is a place to make discoveries: about yourself, about your art, and about the dusty corners of the unknown that we have yet to visit.
Welcome to The Dusty Unknown. I hope you find a home here.
