With the third month of 2017 coming to a close, the 12th and 13th #NEPACreatives have been featured by CoalCreative: Jessica Tracewski, of Scranton, and Denny Corby, of Clarks Summit.
Tracewski brings creativity to the area through digital music, art and video. She interprets upbeat tunes on her keyboard, draws digital art on her laptop, and she enjoys making videos about school buses. Jessica graduated from Valley View High School in 2005 and attended the Career Technology Center in Lackawanna County for graphic arts and computer information technology.
Jessica has low-vision and is also autistic, but she does not let these disabilities get in the way of her work. She is currently involved in the Arc of Luzerne County’s TRACE program offered by LCCC. In one of her blog posts Jessica stated that, ”I learned so much so far to help me reach my goals, attending classes and apprenticeship at the Salvation Army at the San Souci Parkway. I’m going to keep up the good work til I graduate in August.”
Karla Porter, the TRACE program director described Jessica as, “a delightful, bright, and talented student who loves learning new things. She is learning more about herself, gaining self-confidence, and honing her employability skills in TRACE. We are very proud of her progress.”
The 13th creative of the year, Denny Corby, brings creativity to the area through magic as a professional and full time magician-entertainer. There are magicians that Denny admires and looks up to, but he also loves learning about business, sales, and marketing. This has lead him to follow and look up to more business people recently.
“Since I was 16, I worked in almost every aspect of my family’s paper business from the warehouse, deliveries, picking orders, you name it. Then one day my dad goes “You don’t love this — Do you?” He and my family encouraged me to go off and try entertainment full time,” explained Corby. “I didn’t want to live a life of “what ifs” when I was older.”
When asked how he got to where he is now, this is what he had to say: “Lots of hard work, networking, making and building relationships, networking, reading lots of business books, networking, relationships, failing and learning from those failures, pushing your comfort zone, networking, constantly learning and educating myself, relationships, networking … See a theme here?”
To both of these individuals, being creative means leaving something with the people they encounter. On the topic of what being creative means to each of them, Jessica said it is important that she expresses her interests in ways that allow others to experience them through their senses, while Denny said that it is all about being able to use his art to make people laugh and smile almost every night.
When being considered as an NEPA Creative, individuals are asked to explain how they bring creativity to the area, how long they have been doing it and why, and finally what being creative means to them. Once chosen, the next step is to bring each creative into CoalCreative’s studio space to be filmed for a 60 second video that is shared every Wednesday across all their social media platforms. The series plans to highlight all sorts of creatives throughout the rest of the year. There are no limits to who could be considered. Photographers, musicians, barbers, magicians, improv artists are just a handful of the submissions CoalCreative has received thus far.
