About Me

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​I wasn’t raised in one neat world, so I can’t write from one. My entire childhood moved between church pews and drug houses, between women who loved God and a woman trying to survive the night, between music that could lift a room and the kind of chaos that could level one. My mother was beautiful but troubled, lost for as long as I knew her to addiction, selfishness, and instability. My grandmother raised me for much of my childhood, and so did her mother, a lifelong Christian schoolteacher who went wherever she was needed. Between them, they gave me faith, standards, language, and a working knowledge of the difference between polish and substance. Music came down that line too. My grandmother recorded for Chapel Records, and one of my many stepfathers, Gary Vajgrt, was a gifted trumpet player who moved through real musical circles, so I learned early that what looks glamorous from a distance is usually much messier, sadder, stranger, and far more human up close. I grew up all over this country, and I’ve spent more than thirty years in Washington, where the Pacific Northwest finally gathered all those scattered pieces into something like a voice. I’ve worked in healthcare now for more than twenty years, which keeps a person close to reality and strips away the appetite for nonsense. I still go to live music every chance I get, because some things are better understood in a room full of people who care as much as you do. So, when I write here about beauty, endurance, faith, appetite, atmosphere, memory, or the difference between what’s hollow and what's solid, I’m not borrowing a point of view. I come by it honestly.

~Amy Younce

           Not borrowed taste. Not a beige opinion. Just a life lived in enough worlds to know what holds.