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about me
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I have been a longtime student of the arts. Long ago, my fingers began to dance over the keys of an old upright piano to tell a story that my four-year-old words could not yet articulate. This nascent musicality dawned a necessity for creative expression. I began composing music in elementary school and short stories in middle school. Throughout high school, I participated in a plethora of creative outlets, from jazz band to talent shows to poetry contests and more.
Starkly, I hadn’t read a *real* book until the Christmas break of my senior year of high school. For some unfounded reason, I refused to read, because I had this sad concept that reading was for dweebs. I was the student that teachers loathed: the one who was in all the honors classes because he knew how exams worked, because he knew how to read enough Sparknotes to pull out an A. But then I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. It changed my life. But I didn't read it because I wanted to; I read it to spite my AP Lit teacher, who handed me the book and made some comment about how the book would get better use being donated. So I read the whole thing just to prove her wrong.
You know those butterflies you get when you are in a new relationship? Maybe it's the potential, the dreams, the newness. Overtime those butterflies flutter away, and the relationship either gets real or ends. But with me and reading, the butterflies never went away. I keep reading more and more. The complete one-eighty of my senior year brought me to Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, where I produced music in a recording studio, learned how to interpret literary and visual art, and—most surprisingly—wrote my very own novel.
I have been fortunate enough to travel to quite a few places throughout my life. I've been to five continents (or thirty-two countries!), three of which I've called 'home' for a time. The effect of this diversity of “place” has fostered within me the call to create a community where people from all outlooks can gather to inspire, encounter, and recover the biblical imagination that beckons us into the creativity and cooperation for which we were created. Exactly how I go about doing that, I am not yet sure. But I know I have a story that needs to be told. Cue this site. It is a reservoir of written and visual content; its purpose is to share the experiences of Tom Dearduff (me!), an amateur storyteller who is absolutely and utterly lost.
I am a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, where I spent three years studying the intersection of faith and culture. It was during these studies that I met and married my wife, Gabrielle, who teaches me every day that I am beloved. We recently moved (back) to Nashville, Tennessee, where I am working as the Digital Learning Specialist for The Upper Room.
I enjoy reading the works of the Inklings, drinking warm cups of coffee, and nerding out over a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. My favorite song is either Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C Minor or Alex Somers’ The Harbinger. And I strongly believe that petrichor should be a candle scent.
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