I'm Ryan. I'm 1 of 4 boys. In High School I wrote these books for a fun little game my brothers were working on called Myst. It turned out the game wasn't so little and ended up selling over 12 million copies worldwide. By the time I was enrolled in University my brothers started working on a sequel and I wondered why I was in school, studying something I didn't care about. So I left school and started cleaning bathrooms for Cyan. (We all have to earn our place.) 

I eventually designed worlds and puzzles, I wrote histories and characters and dialog, and I edited sound and videos and images. I even dressed up in a Moiety Scout costume and "acted".  I helped to create video games for over 10 years. 

During my time at Cyan, my wife and I had our third child and we needed a birthday invitation for her. I made one. My wife liked it. So, we started a company called Mango Ink that sold invitations to other people who might want them. That was over 13 years ago. It still rocks out holiday cards every fourth quarter. 

While at Cyan and doing Mango Ink on the side, I wrote some books. The first was a fiction book (Inkarri) and the second was a non-fiction (The Naked Fruit). I had an agent but no one jumped so I started to publish books myself through Mango Ink. Why not? I wrote a third non-fiction (Everything Breathes) a little later, another (Cleaning Church Toilets) after that.  

While at Cyan, a church - New Community - offered me a job. That made no sense, unless you know my story. I was raised by a pastor who liked to move. I moved 6 times by my Sophomore year which meant I a) ate alone in the cafeteria and b) saw a lot of diverse worlds, met a lot of diverse people, and had a lot of diverse experiences. Oh, I also became a bit addicted to change and challenge.  I was familiar enough with the church world to know it could use a lot of innovation but not be scared by the religion of it. Not yet. That would come. So I took the job and became a leader of a different kind. The chance to be creative in another venue - speaking - seemed fun. My first year  was like being thrown in the ocean and told to survive. I did. I actually loved it. Well, parts of it. 

In 2010 I, along with some other people,  began a different kind of community, Branches. I cleaned bathrooms there quite often and also talked about life, faith, humanity, and the metaphor of the mystery that transcends all categories of human thought including being and non-being (to quote Joseph Campbell). I also met and talked to amazing human beings every week from each and every walk of life. 

In 2014, I took some wall art - centered around air travel, airplanes, and airports (more things I love) from Mango Ink and moved it to its own site where it could live and breathe and thrive without holiday cards all around it. That site is called 08left. It's been around 6+ years and has been featured in Flying Magazine, among others, and was a design finalist for Martha Stewart a couple of years in a row. 

In 2016, I couldn't help but put some designs on some shirts, to try to speak a message and support some cool non-profits who are trying to bring more equality - I called that Republic of Equal. It was a few month experiment project that is now evolving and growing with new owners after it was sold to new owners who could breathe special life into it for their own personal reasons.

There's been some other projects and passions, and I  figured it would be nice to combine them all into one spot. 

So, here it is.

In 2018 I quit my job at Branches with not a lot of ideas about what is next. That change addiction is for real. And the idea that the expression of church needs some serious evolving is real. In fact, so much change that, sometimes, you just need to start with something fresh. Fresh as in, pour gasoline on the place, throw in a match and walk out the front door without looking back. What's next? Well, more liberation, inspiration, creativity and more evolution. And no more religion. More graphic design, an aviation podcast, and I did this live event called Lights Like Us that turned into its own kind of podcast with my wife and, most recently, lots more! Speaking of my wife, she is rocking Mango Ink now with a letterpress and all kinds of cool stuff that I could have never done.

She’s also helped me a ton with my new novel, Insipid, which arrived in November of 2019.

So yeah, I have an amazing wife, Heidi, who I've been married to for 28 years (and we still really like each other even though we were absolutely crazy and young and naive and got married when we were 20 :) and I have 3 pretty astounding kids.

I'm Ryan. I do have two middle initials. And this is my site. Check out projects for the list of stuff I’m trying to be a part of, including some tv work, some new game design, some new books from my meetings with “the teacher” and more!

If you're doing something cool in this world. Please tell me about it. In the meantime, let’s create more good.