We were lucky to catch up with Blake Pfeil recently and have shared our conversation below.

Blake, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My latest body of work, All-American Ruins, is a direct result of my parents’ encouragement to go outside and use my imagination. As kids, we lived in the foothills of the Rockies, and an abandoned dairy farm down the hill from my house served as a makeshift sanctuary where I learned to talk to ghosts and play pretend. Almost a spiritual practice, my time spent inside the abandoned dairy farm became my original exposure to the underbelly of American history, as told by its ruins, and I developed an obsession with the way American ruins made me feel, almost like a familiar longing for a time and place that wasn’t my own. (A sensation unofficially described as “anemoia” in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.)

It’s exceedingly likely that whatever that feeling was could be summed up as an overactive imagination. That said, the fanciful memory of the abandoned dairy farm from my childhood became important to me. It transformed into the catalyst for my decision to try all sorts of artistic practices in life, to explore my creative interests as they arise in me. My parents’ insistence that I learn to exist in the world, equipped with my imagination, taught me how to think creatively, namely about the problems, the solutions, and the change I want to see in the world. I’m fortunate that I never truly had to focus on one thing or the other. I was interested in audio, journalism, radio, politics, writing, film, education, theater, music, performance, and many other multidisciplinary pursuits that have found me in all sorts of interesting jobs and positions over the course of my life as a professional artist.

Blake, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m award-winning multidisciplinary artist with current projects that touch audio, performance, writing, independent journalism, photography, and film. My background is in theater, but that is underscored by a whole host of other fiddles I played when I was in my 20s, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I started as an actor but was exposed, very early on, to a range of other disciplines, from across time and space, that always kept my artistic interests incredibly varied: vintage radio dramas, independent print journalism, 1970s American animation, 1950s suspense, thrillers, and horrors, and much more. Until the age of 30, I tried it all: a film and TV casting office, a harbor performance cruise line, a radio station, several acting gigs on stage and in film, a millennial tech startup, a folk band, and I even developed children’s musicals for the Korean government from 2010-2011. Despite having a virtually useless Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre and a not-nearly-as-but-still-basically-useless Master of Arts in Arts Entrepreneurship, it’s been my work in the nonprofit sector the past seven years that has been the most fulfilling work of my life.

I stumbled into a thriving and forward-thinking community in Upstate New York where the culture around arts, education, and wellness is extremely progressive. Organizations and artists in and around Ulster County, NY have been able to explore the meaning of the word “work” and humanity’s relationship to it, and ask critical questions about the myths and perils of capitalism. This is not to deny my role in a society that currently seems hell-bent on dog-eat-dog; I am part of that system. However, I think of my work as a full-time Operations and Digital Programs Manager at nonprofit storytelling organization TMI Project as an act of service that also allows me to live comfortably. I get the opportunity to serve my neighbors and be a part of a mission that helps everyday folks like you and me tell our stories, to find common ground, to keep building and experimenting during a moment of severe crisis in our society.

I am fortunate to have discovered this community and this job, and it affords me the dream of being a full-time artist on the side. In addition to co-hosting Cinema Kingston! on Radio Kingston/WKNY (107.9 FM/1490 AM in the Hudson Valley, NY), over the past four years I’ve been working on an ongoing body of work called All-American Ruins, a multimedia travelog in which I fantastically recount my experiences exploring abandoned spaces through multimodal storytelling. The project has been featured at SONOHR Radio & Podcast Festival, On Air Fest, Capital City Film Festival, ArchFilm Lund, Eugene Environmental Film Festival, Garden State Film Festival’s Cinema for the Ears, UK International Radio Drama Festival, Croatia Radiotelevision’s 27th Prix Marulic, North Carolina Museum of History, History Colorado, International Media Festival of Wales, North Star Story Summit, as well as New Jersey, Sydney, Cusco, Melbourne, and New Zealand Web Fests. All-American Ruins has been spotlighted in Business Insider, People, Atlas Obscura, Colorado Magazine, and Apple Podcasts, with accolades from the 2024 Signal Awards (including Best Experimental Podcast), the Ambies (2024 Best Indie Podcast nominee, 2025 Best DIY Podcast nominee), 2024 Press Gazette Future of Media Awards (Regional Podcast of the Year nominee), ParaPod Podcast Awards (Best History Podcast winner), and PopCon Podcast Awards (Best History Podcast winner), among many others. In 2025, the podcast arm of the project, ‘abandoned,’ reached no. 1 on the Apple Podcasts Travel and Places charts.

For years, I struggled with the notion that I hadn’t chosen that “one thing” to do with my life when I realized that I could create that “one thing” that would get me noticed. It is unfathomable to me that artists across this country lack the resources they need to produce the things that speak truth to power and add sincere value to our existence. To quote my mom, “It shouldn’t be this difficult for artists to get noticed.” I’ve spent the last year taking my personal creative work all over the world, sharing it with audiences, and observing how the arts at large are being accessed and presented in the United States. For me, that “one thing” became any body of work like All-American Ruins where I could give myself over entirely and do whatever I wanted, as long as it told a good story.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Give money to artists, plain and simple. The biggest issue artists face in modern America is a lack of access to resources. The overarching arts industry has proven time and again to be economically viable and culturally important. It is preposterous to me that we’re still forcing artists to beg, just to tackle the work they want to tackle. Really, it’s the societal definition of “worthwhile work” that’s the problem.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I tell every single one of my creative friends who hits a challenging moment in their artistic lives to watch one YouTube video (Elizabeth’s Gilbert’s TED Talk “Your elusive creative genius”) and read one book (Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way). Combined, they’re my bible.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://blakepfeil.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/allamericanruins
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakepfeil/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/abandonedpod
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@allamericanruins

Image Credits

All images by Blake Pfeil