We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nat Raum a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nat, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I attended an academically rigorous prep school for high school, but my career and college plans felt uncertain until I took a leap out of my comfort zone and started taking photography classes outside of school. My first class was a two-week extracurricular and showed me my passion for creating art, but my second class, a four-week pre-college intensive, was the moment I really consider myself to have made the decision to pursue a creative future. By the end of my four weeks spent at the local art college I would later attend for my undergraduate studies (Maryland Institute College of Art), I knew there was nothing that would make me as happy as following my passion toward a career in the arts.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a multimedia artist, writer, and publisher proudly based in Baltimore, MD, USA. I’ve been creating since I was very young, and “entered” the art world in 2014, when I started attending the Maryland Institute College of Art for Photography. Since then, I’ve used my creative practice primarily as a means for healing from past trauma—I work with an art therapist in my personal life and find that my process is very informed by the ways in which art can provide an outlet for expression. My work across the last decade has touched a number of topics, such as mental health, relationship abuse, and queerness, as well as spread itself across various media, including photography, collage, book arts, and creative writing.

I tend to think serially, and the book form has always spoken to me in that regard. I declared a Book Arts minor early in my undergraduate studies and became obsessed with the form throughout the rest of my time in college. Since then, I’ve published over fifteen books, both self-published and with various independent presses. This obsession also led me to pursue my MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore.

In 2019, I founded fifth wheel press in response to research I conducted on what demographics of authors were represented by photobook publishers who had previously sent me rejections. Disappointingly but unsurprisingly, many of these authors were cishet white men, and I decided that a space for marginalized creatives within photography publishing was deeply necessary. In 2021, when my practice shifted from being rooted mostly in photography to a more image/text based approach, the press expanded into the literary space.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Spend money on art made by artists. This sounds simple, but in a world where you can buy a ghostwritten book on Amazon and then head down to Home Goods for a mass-produced painting, it goes a long way to spend your money with independent artists and art organizations. Buy books from an indie press. Decorate your walls with your favorite artists’ work. Hire your friend to make that flyer for you instead of using a Canva template.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Between undergrad and grad school, my plan was to make money bartending and then get my MFA and teach. This was derailed significantly when my chronic plantar fasciitis made it impossible for me to stand on my feet for more than a few hours at a time, leading me to consider other ways in which I might make money with my art degree while mitigating my rapidly progressing disability.

At the time, many of the jobs in the Baltimore area that I was applying for were seeking someone with experience in graphic design in addition to photography, usually to form some sort of catch-all content marketing position. I took an asynchronous online graphic design course to build my portfolio, and was also gaining social media management experience from running the fifth wheel press social media accounts, as well as marketing my own art practice. It took a while, but I was able to land a marketing job that, while not necessarily a 1:1 fit with my photography degree, still utilized my creative skills in a way that was fulfilling and meaningful to me. This career path has led to me finding what I hope is my forever-job in the cannabis industry.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://natraum.com
• Instagram: @gr8earlofhell
• Twitter: @gr8earlofhell
• Other: substack: natraum.substack.com

Image Credits

Author photo: V. Morales / Stitchmor
Reading photo with podium: Shay Potter
All others courtesy of artist