Like most artists, I have a day job. I started working last August at a nearby university, and it’s been an eye opening experience. To say that higher ed has changed since I finished my MFA in 1986 would be an understatement at best.

While it was always the case for me, as a theatre major, to be around people with different identities, now we have to take classes and seminars and lunch-and-learns about how to recognize, celebrate, address, and pronoun everybody. Seems like if we were just respectful and embraced each other’s differences that would be good, but now it seems no matter what anyone does, they can be called out for offending someone somehow.

Some days it’s exhausting.

But I do like the concept that we all have multiple identities, and that no one (except maybe my mother) fits exactly into a neatly labeled box. It kind of relieves me of a nagging sense of failure for not fitting a particularly prescribed list of socially acceptable attributes, which change over time and experience anyway.

So this series, Mixed Breeds, isn’t about dogs. It’s about people, and how we each show up in the world in all out identities. It’s a concept that far easier for me than when to use which pronouns.