Meet the author

At many points in my life, I’ve thought about becoming a blogger. It feels strange to begin blogging now, long after the heyday of the personal blog and several years after quitting a writing-focused career. But! I have an actual subject to discuss now, so why not begin?

Who are you?

My name’s Troy. I’m 33 and married with one cat. I recently moved to the south coast of the UK from the east coast of the USA. In my old life, I taught college-level English writing. In my new one, I’m studying to become a barber.

Wow, big pivot.

In some ways it’s a pivot back! Before I was a writing teacher, I was a writing tutor. And I loved tutoring, especially in the college writing center where I was trained. I loved meeting a new student and confronting a new puzzle every hour. I loved using my skills to help them solve that puzzle. Above all else, I loved the immediacy, the structure, the rhythm of it - just me and the student, face to face, talking through the assignment, talking through the paper they’d written, figuring out what they needed to work on and then working on it, the same and yet different every time.

If you’re thinking, “Well, that sounds a lot like what barbers and hairdressers do,” then you understand my vision.

Why barbering and not hairdressing?

Back in the states I had an amazing barber, Emily. When I met her, she was working in the Massachusetts equivalent of Brighton. That’s why I met her. As a queer man, I felt uncomfortable and out of place in traditionally masculine barbershop environments, and I felt so much safer going to a barber with a Progress Pride flag in the window. She had a lot of clients like that.

At one point we began talking about how much those connections meant to her, and how she thought it might be even better for those clients if they saw a queer barber instead of just an ally. I don’t know if that’s true - for me, I generally expect other queer people to be accepting, so it can feel more reassuring to be accepted by people who aren’t.

But I kept thinking about what she said, and how barbering compared structurally with tutoring, and how my partner would wait months to have Emily cut their hair when they visited me in the states rather than see a UK barber, and thinking,

“Maybe that could be me.”

So do you have any background in hair?

Only if you count some ill-advised cutting and coloring experiments on my friends in college, or cutting my own hair during the pandemic, which I don’t. Instead I enrolled in a barbering course at Chichester College in January. It’s exciting to be learning a new skill!

Why blog about it, then?

We’re about halfway through the course now, and I’m feeling the pressure to become employable. I look at my slowly growing portfolio of mannequin heads, and at my CV of completely irrelevant work experience, and at the number of hours I’ve spent in the course versus the number required for licensure back in Massachusetts, and I sweat. I worry about how I’ll convince someone to even let me rent a chair.

It’s not that I think blogging is going to get me an apprenticeship. It’s that I want to create a structure for myself to reflect on what I’m learning, reprocess my notes, and make sure I’m really taking it in - to cross-check my work, if you will. Part of barbering is talking up yourself and your skills. What better way to practice than by writing it out?

(This is unquestionably the writing teacher in me talking. But I wasn’t wrong about it then, either!)

And, you know, it’ll fill out this fun little website I’m building. So that’s a bonus.

We’ll see how it goes!