About Yer Beadmaker

The decision to pursue lampwork full-time was a major creative and professional shift for me. Literature and music (preferably as loud as possible) were my first loves. Before I was kissed by the flame, I lived in the East Village in New York City, and worked as a writer for Rolling Stone. Between 1984 and 1999 I traveled all over the world, got to meet a lot of my musical idols, and developed a number of great and inspiring friendships that endure to this day. It was a blast, and you can probably still find some of my old magazine articles online.

In 1998, Penguin Books published my biography on the rock band Pearl Jam, which was generally well received by critics and more levelheaded admirers of the band, and roundly booed by a lunatic fringe of the band's more hardcore fans, presumably because I exposed a bit more of the machinations behind the myth than the peanut gallery was comfortable with. Oh well. I became obsessed with lampwork not long after I published the book, and aside from a couple of magazine articles, I haven't written anything professionally for a few years now. I still write often, though, and hope to finish at least one respectable novel before I'm too old to have goals anymore.

Louisiana is where I went to high school and where most of my family still lives, and in 1999, I left Manhattan and returned here to recover from book-induced burnout and a badly broken heart. My stay was only intended to be temporary, but I enjoyed living closer to my family, not to mention the more bearable cost of living and the warmer climate. I decided to stay for a while. I had learned the Tiffany method of stained glass fabrication while still in New York, and this led to an interest in hot glass work. By the time I relocated to Louisiana, I had read a number of books on glass beadmaking — the only form of flameworking I could really do without investing thousands of dollars in my own furnace, it was the most logical choice — and when I recognized that an unused workshop on my mother's property would make a perfect studio space, I wasted no time in converting it. Bluff Road Art Glass was born then and there.

I don't really consider myself an "artist," in the poofy sense of the word, so much as I see myself as an exacting technician. I'm a perfectionist with a good sense of color and balance, and all of those traits are probably beneficial to what I do. I don't know if that explains why I would walk away from a lucrative writing career to sit in front of a torch and melt glass all day, but there you go. Mostly, I just really dig making beads. It's a highly meditative process, a constant joy and challenge, and for me, it just keeps getting better and better. Sometimes I think I like glass better than I like most people. Not you, of course.