Season Two, Episode Nine: Dawn Breeze on Fostering Positive Change in our Local Communities

In this episode of Roots to Renewal, Hawthorne Valley's executive director Martin Ping sits down with Artist and Co-founder of Place Corps Dawn Breeze. They discuss the origins and goals of Place Corps a gap year fellowship program that aims to help young people discover their calling and develop a sense of belonging in their communities. Let's listen in as they discuss the importance of creativity, community engagement, and regenerative practices, and fostering personal growth and positive change in our local communities.

To learn more about Dawn Breeze’s projects including: Creativity + Courage™, Place Corps, Instar Lodge, and Sunday Circle visit her website www.dawnbreeze.love.

Thanks for listening to Hawthorne Valley’s Roots to Renewal podcast. We are an association comprised of a variety of interconnected initiatives that work collectively to meet our mission. You can learn more about our work by visiting our website at hawthornevalley.org.

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Transcript

Heather Gibbons (00:10):

In this episode of Roots to Renewal, Hawthorne Valley's executive director Martin Ping sits down with Artist and Co-founder of Place Corps Dawn Breeze. They discuss the origins and goals of Place Corps a gap year fellowship program that aims to help young people discover their calling and develop a sense of belonging in their communities. Let's listen in as they discuss the importance of creativity, community engagement, and regenerative practices, and fostering personal growth and positive change in our local communities.

Martin Ping (00:44):

Good afternoon, Dawn. It is so nice to be with you on this early June day, and I'm delighted you'll be able to introduce you. I think many people in Hawthorne Valley's orbit already know you, but for those who don't, to be able to welcome you as artist, as change agent, as cultural creative, and social entrepreneur and good friend, I would love to get started with your role as a co-founder and director of Place Corps.

Dawn Breeze (01:11):

Yeah, thank you Martin, so much for having me. I'm so excited to have this conversation and I've been eager to have the conversation since you started the Roots to Renewal podcast, so I feel honored today to finally make the cut. It reminds me of Saturday Night Live when you get to wear that special jacket and everyone's so excited that they got invited back, so I kind of feel like, oh, I'm excited, I'm invited to the Roots to Renewal.

Martin Ping (01:36):

You were on the list from Roots to Renewal's inception and I think life has just intervened and it's good that we both find time in our schedules. I know you're extremely busy this week in particular because the Kingston Fellowship will graduate on Friday.

Dawn Breeze (01:52):

Yeah, that's correct. So our second cohort of fellows in Kingston are graduating on Friday after about nine and a half months of being together weekly. So it is a big deal for our fellows and our team, and we're all really excited about that.

Martin Ping (02:07):

Well, I'm excited to come down and witness it and just see some of the fruits of regeneration in place that Place Corps is helping to make happen in Kingston with all the partners down there. I'd love to get into that. Maybe just back up a bit to a little bit more of the origin stories as working here at Hawthorne Valley Waldorf School and teaching in the high school. I've always had this question of, well, what happens next? It's such a special time in one's life, this threshold age between high school and leaving home and starting out on one's own journey in life. And I'm not sure as a society and a culture that we're really creating the best conditions to support young people at that time. And so it really just was a burning question for me. How do we create the conditions for a young person to really open up to the question of who am I, what am I being called to do in the world so that one can actually hear at least an inkling of that calling and then maybe be directed to where they might find support to follow the threads of that calling.

(03:13):

That was really the impulse and I thought, is it going to be a 13th year, a gap year? What would it really look like? And then Matt Stinchcomb, who was one of the founders of Etsy, who was a guest presenter in my grade 12 economics class, and he had the same question after his first time teaching. He's like, what happens next? I said, well, that's my question. So we noodled at about for two or three years of on and off and around the same time that Good Work Institute was being birthed. And it became evident that with Matt Running Good Work Institute and with me running Hawthorne Valley, that Place Corps was not landing even though I think it was something that was so needed. And we said, we need a third person. I thought it should be an artist and we should invite someone who we met through Good Work Institute that was you, and you just took it up and really ran with it from there. And Place Corps was only an idea until you came along. And now it is a real wonderful living, breathing entity and being, which has more life and sparked than I could have ever imagined.

Dawn Breeze (04:19):

Thank you so much for sharing that. And more importantly, thank you for bringing me into that conversation more than five years ago now, today for anyone who doesn't know what Place Corps is for, Place Corps currently is a gap year fellowship program for 18 to 21 year olds to cultivate a calling to know, love and serve our places. And we do that through experiential and community-based learning each day and every month is quite an adventure and it runs the gamut of regenerative farming and gardening to cooking meals, to financial literacy, to building boats, to learning about interpersonal communications and media communications and visual communications to, again, I mentioned civic engagement and how to make changes in one's place through activism, through working with the city, through just you name it, a day could hold everything from just that, from a yoga class to going into photography class to having a debate, to then having community members come in and share their stories to ending the day at Town hall.

(05:26):

So it is really a lot that happens in this period of time. So that question of how do we help young people to identify this, I think what I've been coming to in the last couple of years through this project and process is actually how do we establish a sense of belonging and how do we help young people to feel that innateness because we all do belong here. So something has gotten into the way of us understanding that or feeling that. So how do we remember that and all of this work that we're doing at Place Corps is almost a remembering and if we think of that even in the corporal way of an arm that somehow got lost or moved down the street, how do we bring it back to where it belongs? And I think that's what we're doing in a very creative way.

(06:18):

When we thought about all the things we wanted to offer to young people to help inspire them to know more about what they were feeling called to do and more about their innate creativity and who they were when they showed up here on planet Earth, we decided to make the learning experience a lived learning experience with real results. And I think that was something that sets Place Corps apart from some of the earlier education that youth have had or other traditional education just in public schools, for example, where it's very classroom oriented and there is curriculum year after year after year that is very similar. We wanted to really have embodied practice so that the lessons that we were learning, we could feel them in our bodies and we could be in relationship with them so that we could be testing them. Because so much of what we are seeing right now, and me and you, Martin had just had this conversation the other day, which I love, is that the future is now. And so we can sit in a classroom and talk about what we need to do and look at statistics and look at science and think about that. Or we can be in practice today changing the way that we are buying something, changing the way that we are preparing our food, changing the way that we are talking with one another. And those embodied practices are really what's going to start to turn tomorrow into a different tomorrow.

Martin Ping (07:41):

Beautifully said, and place ultimately really does matter. And this sense of belonging, I think infers that there is a place and a community in which we can belong. And it's not that we're just making this up from out of scratch. The community's there already. So community engagement and community partnership is also key to Place Corps' ability to know love and serve the place that is happening. And can you say a little bit more about the community partnerships that have been forming in the Kingston Fellowship?

Dawn Breeze (08:13):

So the importance of the community partnerships is manifold. One of the reasons why it's important is that it's important for the young people the place to see and learn what is and around them. And oftentimes young people feel and imagine that their possibility lies beyond their place and they don't know all the different kinds of creative offerings and businesses and startups and longtime projects that exist in their place. So it's very important for us to unveil the opportunity that exists and also connect those stakeholders and those youth directly with those people of place. So it's such an essential of this connection of belonging. And the other thing that's really fun is to imagine that our campus is the town or is the city that we live in or is the farmland that we live in. And so how can we also think about education in this way that we don't have to go away to another campus that then sort of mimics and mirrors our townships or our places, but in fact, we can turn that whole community that we already live in into our campus.

(09:24):

First we look at what do we want to teach, what is the curriculum? And then we map that into the city of Kingston and we look at who are the organizations, the institutions, the individuals, the professionals who are doing this work already, and then we reach out to them to see if they have capacity to offer partnership in learning opportunities in professional development and trainings and through what we call service study placement, which is essentially internship opportunities. So that was one of our first steps in developing Place Corps Kingston, and it's something we will do as we grow into other places, is really consider each place as a campus and who's actually doing this work already so that we're not replicating and that we are doing our job by connecting the youth to those practitioners. So in Kingston, we have been delighted with the support of this community.

(10:16):

We have incredible program partners that continue to go, I mean ongoing years after years now working with us and also continue to find new ones. So some of the ones we've worked with this year that r and d partnership with us are the Hudson River Maritime Museum. We work with them in two ways, two strong ways. They help us with our design build part of our curriculum. So our fellows are there once a week building a boat this year from scratch and we're in their shipyard. And some of the things that are so incredible about this, I mean the list could be long. We could spend every day just building a boat and learning everything we needed to about life. I think building a boat, but part of it is obviously it's collaboration. It's a project that they're working on together. Within that there's project management, there's financial literacy, there's time management, there's communications, there's design, then there's also wood, there's also trade, there's also global issues that come into that.

(11:17):

Then from there, because we're on the river, they're also learning boatmanship skills, so learning to row, learning to sail, learning to feel safe on the water, learning the connection of the river historically to their place. We also work with the Hudson River Maritime Museum to learn about the ecology of the river and some of the sciences and deep histories. So learning about the indigenous people that came to this land, how they utilize that area. Again, the city of campus, everything you need to know is right here and we really could probably learn everything that we wanted to from just building the boat. But we have other amazing program partners too. Up the street from the Hudson River Maritime Museum is the rare center, which is the Center for Immigration. That's a museum that focuses primarily on immigrant stories and it's rooted in the family.

(12:08):

It's actually a former Jewish bakery that has multiple generations of Jewish bakers in this one house, and now it's extended into the larger population of immigrants in this area and continues to share stories. So we work with them to do our place story project, which includes oral histories and learning about their own ancestry and identities and how that's influenced who they are today and their relationships around them going up the hill. I'm just going to actually follow the geography of Kingston at this point. So then as we go up the hill and onto Broadway and down into Midtown, some of our program partners include the Woodstock Center for Photography, who's relocated here from Woodstock. We work with them for the purpose of working in identity actually. So how do we tell stories about ourselves and each other? How do we document those stories? How do we see the world?

(13:03):

So it's a great tool for observation. So what is the lens that we're looking at and how is that different from the person right next to me? What did they see when I was standing next to them? That also leads to what are the professions that stem out of this? What are the arts that stem out of this? It's again, we could learn everything we needed to from just doing photography. It's a wonderful partnership. In that same area is Kingston Ceramics Studio. So Kingston Ceramics is an incredible partnership as well. They're located in former factory building. It's a great building. It's full of both residents and artists and businesses and studios. It's an incredible space to be in. It's very lively. We have a great story to share about them because we saw something magical happen in community. Through this partnership, we have something in our Place Corps program called Personal Practice, which is the opportunity for our youth to choose which creative practice they want to develop more strongly and build discipline around as a practice for wellbeing.

(14:10):

And Kingston Ceramics is one of those choices as is the YMCA, as is Nature Walks, as is yoga. There's a few different partners we have. So our kids started to learn the ceramics there and became more and more interested, and Lex, the owner of the studio, came to our homeroom to share her own life story. In that relationship, she felt really inspired to offer more. She said, I want to offer more. I'm happy to continue to teach these classes for free. I feel like that the students will really gain a lot. So this year our students were very interested and continued to go routinely every week to take classes from Lex. Through that ongoing relationship, studio members at the ceramic studio were inspired watching and seeing the youth of Kingston coming in and participating in this professional art studio. So they collectively organized on their own, independent of both the ceramic studio and Place Corps to create a community fund essentially to continue to offer scholarships to the youth at large in Kingston to be able to continue to take classes at Kingston Ceramics and do ongoing studio work. And so it was just this amazing opportunity to witness the flourishing of our mission, I think as well as what Lex is already doing out in the world by following her calling and continuing to love it and then to offer it in service to the community. And then our kids are in there and then the community saw it and then it just as an expander. I love that story and that has recently happened.

Martin Ping (15:51):

That's so highly instructive and so heartening because it's in the founding impulse. When we were really discussing Place Corps back at Instar Lodge, your studio, we were imagining just this kind of gradual emergence and unfolding of relationships in place to really strengthen people just to uncover that sense of community. So it's so great to hear it in real time.

Dawn Breeze (16:15):

I think we were using this word too earlier about it's regenerative. It's this opportunity that keeps giving. We're doing what we love and we're sharing it and then it's being shared forward and it's continuing to inspire others to do it as well. And so it's just this impulse of reciprocity and regenerative. It's so good.

Martin Ping (16:35):

It's radical too. I know we talked a lot about radical learning, but radical as in the sense of erratics or rooted in place. It's for me as somebody who obviously feels connected to place, I often quote Carrie Snyder saying, find your place on the planet, dig in and take responsibility from there. I think it's something that we can all take to heart. Yeah,

Dawn Breeze (16:59):

I love it. I could go on and a on for the winding roads of Kingston to tell you more about partners, and I do want to share just a few more because as I'm still going up Broadway, there's Radio Kingston, please. Yeah, radio Kingston is an incredible partner. We do service study partnership with them, which means that our fellows have the opportunity to select them as an internship opportunity and they have one-on-one relationships, learning about production and projects and radio shows. And our fellow from last year who had that opportunity, he was very inspired by that learning that he had last year. And this year on his own, he submitted a proposal for a radio show and he won against 80 applications and he has his own radio show. In fact, it's tonight Tuesday night at 11 o'clock. He has his radio show and his name is Connor Stella, and we are super proud of him and excited about that opportunity.

(17:55):

So we love Radio Kingston. And then as we go a little further down the road, there's People's Place, which is an absolutely amazing community organization that serves the public through providing a food pantry, a free restaurant, a wellness center, and a thrift store. And so we do weekly volunteering with them and our fellows have the opportunity to learn a lot of different professional skills through those various volunteering opportunities and be in direct service to their community at large. And it's a very special partnership that we love. I'm now moving into uptown a little bit and I'm waving at some partners that I might not have mentioned, but Love You and we're keep going up the street. And then there is Landscape Design. So Landscape Design is civically engaged, community engaged Landscape Design group, and Karine, the artist who runs that has worked with us for two years now to be doing socially engaged artwork with the youth.

(18:57):

With that they are co-designing creative interventions into place and creating these projects. Again, they identify program partners and other collaborators. And so this year the project that they came up with was called the Moon Trail, which was the opportunity for these period pantries. They've now been nicknamed throughout the city, but they are areas where the public can access free menstrual products. And also we worked with Rob from Trust Hub who's another partner to be able to create it through also a virtual map so that you would be able to identify where is the nearest moon trail period pantry and be able to identify where you could have free access to products. So that was a project that they did this year, which was really exciting together. The first box is plates out of TIL's Kitchen, which is also in Midtown. The list goes on, they're making zines, they're creating activist projects. The list just keeps going. It's an incredible city and the youth are very lucky, I think, to be engaged in this way. I think the city is lucky to have youth too that are engaged.

Martin Ping (20:07):

I would hope that anyone listening to this in whatever location and place they're in would be inspired and recognize that we all have our places and all of our places need the same level of attention of knowing, loving and serving or care that is possible anywhere. And as far as regeneration and healing some of the social schisms that seem to plague us, there's nothing better than working together on solving issues that we all face and that impact of wellbeing of our places and our pathways towards hopefully flourishing for all people in place. And so I'm listening to it and thinking this could be anywhere. It's Kingston and it's great that it's Kingston and all places deserve the same level of love and attention that is being generated through Place Court Fellowship in Kingston.

Dawn Breeze (21:04):

Yeah, I agree. I know that it's in our vision and always was in our vision that place where could be anywhere and that the model is that small and many that we are able to offer these sort of high touch cohorts but offer many of them so that they could be networked and intertwined together, but a hundred percent they could be anywhere. I think what would be exceptional about that is that each one of them would be unique to their place. And so while they would be following the same guidelines curricular-ly, they would all look so different because so many places are unique and different and working with community partnership in delivering curriculum that changes based on what is happening in that place. So I hope that in the near future we can see that in action and be able to look at what do two place cores look like? What do five Place Corps look like? What do 500 Place Corps look like?

Martin Ping (22:08):

And we know from the start, because we started Place Corps right here at Hawthorne Valley as a residential program and then Covid came along and it was all part of a larger destiny for Place Corps that it happened this way, but there was a rural expression for Place Corps. It's now in a small city and I think it ultimately could be anywhere already. For me, the idea that it is honoring the place where it is is a game changer because it's counter to the sort of making all places look the same through some sort of generic schema that we see out there with all too common. I'm not going to name any big box stores or anything like this, but when I go to a place I like to find out what's actually different about the place, not what makes it the same as any other place. And I think that that genius of the place, geni loci is something that wants its voice to be known again.

Dawn Breeze (23:03):

Yeah, I love that. I think what is the same, well the same as what we all want, right? The same as we want belonging. We want shelter, we want food, we want warmth, we want beauty. So that's what we should find everywhere. Wouldn't that be great? And then the rest could be a little different

Martin Ping (23:22):

And we get to celebrate that difference and really come around that as something to really hold up as woo-hoo. And just to say this original idea around a vocation as something say more than just a job that you're being prepped for in life, but that you're really getting to listen for your calling. I might point that one of our original cohorts here at Hawthorne Valley who then did some interning in the school at Hawthorne Valley, really found a passion and a love for teaching and went on to Harvard to get her master's in teaching and will be returning in the fall to actually take a class at Hawthorne Valley, take one of the grades. So absolutely thrilled to see this imagination that Place Corps might serve that function for anyone, but to see it in real time with a real person who we know and care about so deeply is super gratifying for too many people, in too many places, a young person in a place that might be gentrifying or having other phenomenon happening, it's making it very expensive that they don't necessarily feel comfortable seeing their future in their own place. It's like I have to go somewhere else. So the housing question and affordable housing is something that I know Place Corps it's eye on. And Hawthorne Valley, certainly similar for same reasons. It's just the costs of living in Columbia County, New York are outpacing the not-for-profit salary. So we have to get way creative on a lot of these solutions and hopefully in partnership with others, start forming new patterns around how to make affordable housing available for everyone who wants to stay and live in their places.

Dawn Breeze (25:17):

Yeah, a hundred percent very interested in having the residential learning component but also featuring it into transitional living opportunities so that young people coming out of Place Corps can establish roots and actually develop livelihoods and then ideally would love to even move further down into visioning into how can we also help these young people of their place become stakeholders and potentially co-own and create cooperatives based on some of the learning that then practices that they've had. And in Kingston, we work with a lot of young people that have been historically underserved and marginalized, and so how can we actually help them to change the opportunities for themselves and their future families too? So it feels really essential to start to find and create these opportunities for home ownerships and new models of living together.

Martin Ping (26:15):

And again, this is a phenomenon that all places share in one degree or another and the idea that the solutions can be generated in place with the people of the place as opposed to waiting for somebody from somewhere else to do it for us, it could be a long wait and nor is that ever as satisfying as actually doing something ourselves. So it's great. And I'm curious, what's next for Play Corps that you see is the housing is certainly one of the things that I know we're looking at talking about and the idea of maybe expanding into other areas, but what do you see on the horizon for Place Corps?

Dawn Breeze (26:55):

Well, I think that there are a couple of things that have always been there from the inception, which is that we hope to have place cores throughout. I'd like to say the bio region, but then I also am a big dreamer, so I'm imagining they could go farther, but we would love to have more place cores and also continuing to think about how and who is able to access it. And so what are the best ways that we are able to reach. Young people also are thinking about what are the regenerative enterprises that we can co-create with our youth to act as both opportunities for supporting the organization but also supporting the professional development of the youth and providing income too. Again, increasing the wealth and the health of a place. Also working towards figuring out and moving towards certain accreditation opportunities. I think we're just always looking for how can we provide the most impact and reach the most people, but at the same time maintaining the quality and integrity of what we're trying to do. So slow growth, but maybe deep growth,

Martin Ping (28:10):

Slow growth and deep growth. I love that. And I can say just observing how you've practiced this in these first five years, you've really adhered to that with never wanting to jump ahead of ourselves, but to really stay true and to prototype and work out kinks before it goes any larger. So I think it's been great

Dawn Breeze (28:33):

In some ways I've seen other projects or programs sort of get stuck in the mud of trying to figure everything out correctly before they start. And I want to say that I think that Place Corps is adventurous and that we are actively engaging and learning through doing. And so I'm quite proud actually that we did start sort of just like I remember in our first conversations and we were like, well, when should we do it? And Matt and me were like next year. And that feels like a pretty big jump to go from an idea to running a fully residential program and actually having kids in a curriculum and partners and educators. But we did do it and I am so grateful that we did take that leap and that we have risked mistake and that we have put ourselves out there because we are learning through doing. And I do think that inevitably we have to embrace imperfection and foibles and all the things as we go, but I am so glad that we're out there doing it.

Martin Ping (29:37):

Well, I agree. And I remember those conversations and I remember at one point kind of like, well, maybe we should pull back and wait till next year. And then I remember being adamant that no, we have some momentum and we have to, there's a quote about that where boldness has genius and you just have to go for it. So I should have it memorized. It was on my refrigerator for years, but it's in my forgety now, not my memory. But that being said, I just would like to say we have also quiet partners in the background who responded with financial support in the early days and they know who they are and it really, they heard the vision and believed in it, and that gave us a lot of courage to act on our creativity and go for it. Creativity and Courage are two important words. And you've actually developed a curriculum, I believe that's called Creativity and Courage. Can you say a little bit about that? How's that first segue? 

Dawn Breeze (30:41):

That was very professional. Yeah. So Creativity and Courage, yes, that is a curriculum that I developed more than 10 years ago and was actually what brought me into this relationship with you and Martin as well. And is in lots of ways the bedrock of thinking and practices underneath a lot of Place Corps. And so creativity and courage is a curriculum that I developed out of my own practice as a studio artist. Again, many years ago I was more in the studio, now I'm more on the streets, but also coming back into the studio a bit more now these days. But as I mentioned before, this feeling and this belief that we all innately are artists and that by art I mean that we make meaning and we make knowledge and that we have creative abilities. So I feel that when we embrace that and when we identify ourselves as creatives, we are more powerful to make change, whether that's for our own healing and wellbeing or for others.

(31:44):

And so I really wanted to offer opportunities for people of all different kinds to rediscover that self and that identity and apply it to whatever they want it to. And I think of it as liberation of imagination and also as opportunities for reconnection with self. And I started it initially designing it for people in dual diagnosis treatment centers. And that came out of my own experience losing my sister who was beloved and wanting to work specifically with an audience who struggled with mental wellbeing. But then as I started working on the curriculum specific for this place that I was going to work with, I realized that everyone can benefit from Creativity and Courage. And so why not bring this out into the world at large? And that is what I was doing. And as I started offering the workshops and teaching them in different institutions and organizations, it moved into more corporate settings as well and found its way into Etsy and into the senior management teams and leading Creativity and Courage workshops tailored towards things such as leadership or communications or conflict resolutions. And again, using art as the methodology but not necessarily for artist. And really seeing the benefits of how when we tap into our creativity, we have new insights and new opportunities for these connections. And it's even most recently, I was able to offer one of these workshops to a group of tech CEOs. Actually, I was just sharing that with you because the title of their rich retreat was Roots to Robots. So it's really applicable to us all. And yeah, I still do it. I love it. Yeah,

Martin Ping (33:47):

We are all creators. In the end, the more we're able to be reminded of that and the more we're able to be supportive of each other in that endeavor, the more creative we will be. And we need creativity and imagination if we're going to find ways of being together on this rapidly changing planet.

Dawn Breeze (34:04):

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I like to say we all create meaning and that this is what art is, and sometimes it's a painting and sometimes it's a poem, and sometimes it's the way someone unfolded their clothes, and sometimes it's the way that a child walks and found something and saw something in a way that you never saw it before. So I think too that we have to revision what we mean by this word and revalue it so that we can all take ownership of being artists and recognizing that that value is so tremendous and we all have that.

Martin Ping (34:41):

Well, you certainly do live it and are an example for everyone who comes in contact with you of that possibility. And I am so grateful to be able to call you friend and partner and colleague in all of this and for all that I gain and learn from working in this working relationship. So I want to thank you, Dawn, so much for your time today and for all that you are doing to make Place Corps such a beautiful expression of this crazy idea that's been floating around waiting to be born on the earth.

Dawn Breeze (35:18):

Well, thank you, Martin, for both today and for this ongoing opportunity to be in this question of how do we cultivate a calling to know love and serve our places, and may we continue to be in that quest for all our lives and also continuing to serve what we love. Thank you.

Heather Gibbons (35:39):

To learn more about Dawn Breeze's projects, including Creativity and Courage, Place Corps, Instar Lodge, and Sunday Circle, visit her website www.dawnbreeze.love. Thank you for tuning in to Hawthorne Valley's Roots to Renewal podcast. We're an association of interconnected initiatives working together to fulfill our mission. To learn more about what we do, visit our website at hawthornevalley.org. As a registered 501C3 nonprofit, we depend on the generosity of supporters like you to continue our work. Please consider making a donation today. You can also support us by spreading the word about this podcast, share it with your friends, and don't forget to leave us a rating and review. Special thanks to Grammy Award-winning artist Aaron Dessner for providing our soundtrack and Aaron Ping for once again contributing his editing expertise.