Meet Our New Intern: Brendon Blair

I’m not joking when I say I’ve had several mothers and fathers, mountains of people that roll through my life like the hills I know as my home. When I say I’ve lived everywhere in Knoxville, I’m not kidding at all, and I know I can’t trade it for the world. But oh boy do I try! My place in this world is one to learn, that’s about as much as you can ask from me as an early-twenty-something. What better way to learn than to read the works of others?

As it has grown over the years, I find myself more and more attracted to my hometown’s book scene. McKay’s, estate and yard sales, as well as any secondhand book store, are the most likely places to find me. So many accessible books! From a very young age, I found myself pouring over textbooks, almanacs, encyclopedias, memoirs, and the mythology series we all read as kids.

I have not met many people who have walked my path before me. But I have met many people whose perspectives I cannot get enough of, as well as people who I talk to once and never again that I remember. I know people have told me it is important for me to share my story, as a child of immigrants passed through foster care’s many hands.

I know it is important to share the works of others. I’ve always needed them to feel like someone walks beside me. These things, as well as the popular morning sun and waning moon in every college poem, are what have compelled me to dream of writing.

I’ve worked odd jobs since I was fourteen; coffee shops, retail, hospital work, and research, sometimes multiple at once. However, my passion really lies in digital archives and preservation. Have you ever held a work of art older than you are? It’s what I’ve chosen to work in for now. People have always praised my work ethic or the way I meld smoothly into whatever’s thrown at me, and now I think to myself, “What if there’s something more? Something left to do I haven’t yet?”

I don’t want to write about what makes other people happy or what is the most productive. I want to write about the laughs between construction workers when the birds wake and a pole falls into the snow. I want to write about a girl in her car, working the grind in fast food, winning the lottery. I want to write the morning sun for someone who thought they’d outgrown learning. I am so, so grateful to write for Sundress Publications because of the doors I know it will open for my future and all of the reading I am sure to do more of this semester. Whenever I read, I learn to write, and whenever I learn to write, I learn how to live a life well-penned.

Brendon Blair is an Appalachia-borne writer born and bred on trailer living and warm Mexican cuisine. Having a dual major in Psychology and English from the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Brendon enjoys intertwining the experiences of queer and fostered people in poetry and prose. They also hold an administrative assistantship at the Office of Science and Technology Information in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. When not writing or working, Brendon enjoys playing strategy games, and dreams of owning a cat to call Eggs Benedict.