Courtney Reed-Marsh has always been drawn to the transformative power of stories and the arts. The new arts agency administrator of LA Arts has a background in writing, publishing, and arts administration, and has spent a career exploring the areas where creativity, community and difference-making meet.

Reed-Marsh has lived in cities and towns across the United States, from Boston to wine country in Northern California. Now living in Auburn, Reed-Marsh intends to use that work and life experience and passion for the arts to foster a vibrant arts community.

What is your name, how old are you and where are you from? My name is Courtney Reed-Marsh and I’m still not sure how it happened, but I’ll be turning 50 on the spring equinox. I’m originally from the other L.A. (you may have heard of it?), but I’ve lived in big cities and small towns back and forth across the country for the past many years. Los Angeles, Boulder, Colorado, Boston, New York City, Chicago, Northern California’s wine country, back to New York, in the Hudson Valley and now Auburn, Maine. It wasn’t a move that I could have predicted, but it makes absolute sense, especially now that I’m stepping into this new role at LA Arts, which feels like exactly the right opportunity for me to root into this community, where I intend to stay, from a place of really bringing the parts of myself that make me most wholly who I am.

Can you explain what you do for LA Arts? What are the most rewarding points to you about your job? My position at LA Arts is a brand new one, so it’s still emergent, really. I bring a broad range of experience in a number of different areas related to the arts, but if I had to distill it all into a single framework, I’d say that my most valuable skill is the ability to look at the whole, broad night sky and notice the constellations that other people might not see. It’s about storytelling, about meaning-making, recognizing the patterns and feeling into which pieces connect to what, and how they might work together better — whether that’s better in the sense of efficiency, or potency, or creative possibility.

So, I’m joining this organization, which has deep history already and has been through multiple transformations over the past 50+ years of its service to the Lewiston/Auburn community, to support this next phase of visioning and impact. (I do this) by focusing on operations and strategy, growing marketing and communications, building and implementing systems that can honor the mission and values of LA Arts as not just makers or producers of cultural experience, but as stewards of community with a responsibility to the diverse groups of people who make up this place.

I recognize that I’m coming in as an outsider without any of that history here, and I’m both humbled and extremely grateful to have been welcomed into this creative community. What feels most rewarding so far is being given the chance to contribute meaningfully as I’m building new relationships and making a home for myself, professionally and personally.

What drew you to LA Arts? I’m an artist myself — a writer and a performer, primarily — so in that sense there’s a natural instinct whenever I land in a new place to seek out whoever is doing good work in the local arts scene. But it isn’t just that. I worked for a number of years at the Arts Council of Sonoma County, about an hour north of San Francisco. Through that experience I gained a much more nuanced understanding of the ways in which local arts communities function as a vital and living component of the larger cultural ecosystem, both economically and in terms of what it means to belong in a place, to express oneself and feel witnessed, to see one’s humanity mirrored through the creativity of others in a way that is validating, inspiring, even healing.

I’ve lived in Auburn since 2022 and have been working with writers from all around the world from my little home office, feeling pretty isolated from actual life, here. So, when I saw the listing for the agency administrator position at LA Arts I jumped at the chance to get involved.

Going back to your youth, what did you think you would be doing at your age? I honestly don’t know that I ever imagined being this age when I was young, but if I did I probably expected that I would have produced a spectacular body of creative work by now. Instead, I discovered along the way that what I love most about the creative process is collaboration, so I’ve made my living by supporting other artists and culture makers in bringing their projects to life, while my own practice has received less of my professional focus.

How do you balance work and life? Truthfully, I don’t last long in any environment where I can’t be in my integrity. On the one hand this has meant that I’ve simply removed myself from work situations that asked me to compromise my own values, which has been a bit of a superpower in terms of personal wellbeing. On the other, though, it has meant that I have a tendency to wholly throw myself into projects that I’m passionate about, where I’m really aligned with and devoted to the mission or vision.

Earlier in my career this led to multiple bouts of burnout and, eventually, to chronic illness, which have in themselves become incredible teachers. At this point, I’ve learned to choose work that feels symbiotic in some fundamental way — like I’m both giving and receiving beyond just the monetary — within a context that actually values human beings and not just business outcomes. And I have a partner who is very lovingly vigilant about making sure I get enough sleep and good food to eat, so that definitely helps, as well!

What are some of your favorite things while not working? I’m really lucky to have the family that I do. They’re all brilliant, creative, and incredibly weird in the best possible ways. I homeschool my child, who will be turning 12 soon . . . and we all know that’s when the protagonist of every YA adventure novel gets jumped into their epic quest. I love how immediate and relevant everything becomes when you experience it through the lens of supporting a young person to become their most fully realized self in the world. Beyond the everyday things, I love getting to know the land and the water here, connecting with other people who care deeply about showing up in the world with passion, compassion, and conviction.

And then there’s “Story,” which is really the central organizing principle of my world. Books, theater, film, the fleeting narrative of watching a cormorant attempt to swallow a fish that’s several times larger than its own head. I can’t imagine going through life without Story.

What is the most important part of your day? The most satisfying? The most important part of my day is whenever I can be really present and take action, however big or small, from a place of love. Whether that’s slowing down to listen intently to my child, bringing my whole creative self to a work project, finally claiming time for my own spiritual and creative practice, or something else entirely. Presence and alignment from love are what make anything important possible. It’s a lot harder than I wish it were a lot of the time, but living up to that intention is one of the most satisfying feelings I know.

Who are your biggest influences? My biggest influences are creative people who are so true to themselves and to their own liberatory vision, whatever that may be, that their work transcends entertainment, or educational purpose, or conceptual ingenuity to have a profound and personal impact on their audiences. There are far too many people to name, but more often than not these are queers and trans and disabled folks, Black and brown artists or other kinds of truth-tellers whose lived experience from the fringes of mainstream culture offer perspectives that can take our breath away with their starkness and beauty.

Right now, Alok Vaid-Menon is a major inspiration and guiding light. John Cameron Mitchell’s work has been incredibly meaningful for me — “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” of course, but their other works, too. And I’ve recently come to know about an awesome eco-punk artist collective from the Democratic Republic of Congo, called Fulu Miziki, who build all their own instruments and costumes from trash and recycled materials. Their work is really exciting to me. There are so many people making such brilliant, powerful work in the world.

What are you working on, now? Right now I have far more projects that I want to be working on than time to devote to them. I’ve been dancing with a hybrid fiction-personal narrative book project for years and can feel that it is almost ready to find its final form. I’m getting ready to launch several offerings for writers in the form of a creative collective and practice community called Radical Storytelling.

There’s a craft book in the works, too, based on ideas and processes I’ve developed in my teaching over the past several years. And I’m always dreaming of finding the right conspirators to get a new band together. But I’ve decided that my core creative commitment for 2025 will be the cultivation of an everyday practice of prose poetics as a way of courting that quality of presence that I talked about earlier, which is going to be more important than ever the higher the stakes get for us all culturally, politically, and environmentally.

What kind of legacy do you want to build? I haven’t spent much time thinking about legacy, to be honest, because it feels like a more individualistic way of orienting to meaning and impact than I’m really able to relate to, personally. Of course I want to realize my own artistic vision in as many ways as possible, but even there I tend more often than not toward collective creation. I suppose the best way of answering this question is to say that I want my work in the world — in any and all its forms — to inspire people to imagine beyond the boundaries they’ve felt constrained by and to feel empowered to put that imagination into tangible action to make their own impact.

What is one question you would ask yourself in an interview? Perhaps, why am I so obsessed with “Story.” The answer is this: Because I believe that we are very literally storying ourselves and our world into being all the time, and they who control the narratives dictate the consensual and non-consensual realities we all experience on a daily basis. There’s marketing, and political propaganda, and all that, sure, but I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about how we find our joy and our pleasure and our power in the face of those dominant narratives. How we stand in our own grief while also holding space for beauty. I’m talking about how we resist so that we can thrive, as individuals and in community. But I’m also not talking about love-and-light spiritual bypass, or conveniently overlooking the details that don’t suit the versions of ourselves we’d prefer to center.

We often cannot change the facts of the world, not single-handedly and not in the face of massive systemic oppression. We certainly can’t change anything that has already happened, but we have the right and the responsibility to make our own meaning. To look truthfully at our stories and let go of the old, calcified versions of what we decided (or were told) they meant, and to relate to them with enough curiosity, wider-context awareness, capacity for self-reflection, and willingness to be surprised that they can reveal themselves to us in more relevant and empowering ways, whether those stories become public works of art or are quietly held in our own hearts for the rest of our lives — or until they have something new to teach us all over again.