In 1992 a choir director in a public school in Kentucky heard something in my voice & started giving me voice lessons after school. I had just failed freshman English & was a terribly lost kid. He introduced me to opera & gave me art as a way to survive.

He died on Thursday.

I hadn’t seen him since I left KY, but when my first book came out I talked about him in an interview for the @courierjournal. He came to my reading at @carmichaelsbook, & I was able to thank him for a generosity I didn’t fully understand at 14, & for saving my life.

If it weren’t for him, I would never have become a writer. I probably wouldn’t have gone to college. He was shocked—he hadn’t had any idea of the impact he had.

When I wrote in the first chapter of Cleanness about teaching that “the consequences echo across years & silence, we can never real know what we’ve done,” I was thinking a lot about him. He changed the lives of hundreds of kids over decades. I’m sure many of us never told him.

I’m so glad I got the chance to thank him.

If you are someone who has been rescued, please thank the people who did the rescuing.

There’s no time like the present.

I remember the first time I heard him sing—it was like a sheet of gold blazed across the room. It made me understand what it meant to have a vocation, to be called. It changed my life.

RIP David Brown, brilliant singer & teacher.