Penn's Bio

I grew up on the black prairie of Lowndes County, Mississippi, about 10 miles outside of Columbus, a town of 25,000. My mother was a teacher, then an elementary school principal. My dad did a lot of different jobs, among which were farmer, banker, and postman. I learned to shoot a rifle when I was about six years old, a shotgun when I was seven, and killed my first dove when I was eight. I was a really good student and wasn't much into politics when I was young. My parents were (and still are) Reagan-era Republicans, and my paternal grandparents are good old Southern Democrats (or Dixiecrats as some folks call them). I was a Boy Scout and even stayed in long enough to become an Eagle Scout. I grew up calling the noon-time meal "dinner" and the evening meal "supper." I still don't understand where the rest of the country gets the idea that dinner is at night. Where I come from we're suspicious of Californians, Yankees, and anyone who talks fast (because they must be trying to pull one over on you if they have to talk that fast). But we have good morals down there in the South, and don't you forget it. Well, at least that's what they tell you in church. What I'm getting at is that I wasn't raised the way most folks assume a radical environmentalist anarchist was raised.

After a properly nerdy high school career, I went off to the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. While in school there, I studied physics and eventually got involved in environmental activism and social justice activism. During the summer between my junior and senior year I came to the realization that going to graduate school and continuing in the field of physics would more likely than not end up with my unintentionally helping out the US war machine. And I didn't want any piece of that. I went ahead and finished up my undergraduate degree since I didn't figure that would hurt anything and I may even learn something, and then not-so-promptly took a job as a computer programmer.

The computer job ended up transferring me from Oklahoma to Washington, DC. When they tried to transfer me back, I quit, and stayed in DC. I cast about for months trying to find a job that I felt good about while also trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. My life was horribly depressing and lonely at that time, so I did what any sane person would do in such circumstances: I went to Central America to study Spanish. A month in El Salvador and a month in Guatemala hanging out with ex-guerrillas and learning a new language would give me the meaning and direction I needed, right? Uh huh. Of course I didn't find the meaning and direction that I was hoping for, but many other good things came out of that journey: a new language, good friends, and new opportunities to help people and try to make the world a little bit better. Cheesy, yes, but entirely true.

When I returned to DC from Guatemala I went back to being a full-time activist, which is what I had been doing in DC when I wasn't scanning the classifieds and websites looking for a decent job. Well, SEPTEMBER 11th. Yeah, you know what I mean. And here's the part where you see me roll my eyes and you know just by my look that I'm secretly thinking, "Al Qaida? Bin Laden? Whatever. Not my first choice for fingerpointing in this overblown mess. And by the way, where is America's outrage at the terrorism that our very own government commits and supports in places like El Salvador, Colombia, Chile, Iraq, East Timor, Burma, etc?" The racist patriotic stupidity of the whole debacle aside, it had a huge impact on the activist community and political work in DC. Where once a comment or a protest sign brought a few glares, it now brought shouting, threats, and police. This atmosphere, combined with intensified in-fighting in nearly every left-leaning activist group in DC quickly sent me into a world of disillusionment and depression.

I decided that my way out, my way of staying alive, was to return to interests that I had put off for a few years. I wanted to get as far from Big City as I could and live a real life, one free of artifice. A friend directed me to Dancing Rabbit's website. I applied for an internship. After I had been here for a few months, I decided I wanted to stay as a member. In September of 2002 I started building a strawbale cabin, and in November moved into it. The cabin wasn't what you'd call "finished" and that first winter was cold. I've since gotten more of the cabin completed and now it holds heat during the winters. Ahh, simple comforts.

Well, that's about all the biographical information I care to give at the moment. I left out a lot of stuff like playing the banjo, building furniture, using unpowered hand tools, Bluestem co-op, and schicken, but if you want to know about that stuff you'll just have to come visit and strike up a conversation with me.