Today we’d like to introduce you to Duncan Sligh.
Hi Duncan, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Entering college in 2015, I thought I knew what I wanted to do: I’d attend SCAD, receive a performing arts degree, and work the rest of my life as an actor. To a 19-year-old mind, it seemed like a pretty simple path, and seeing as I loved acting, it didn’t seem all that hard either.
I was incredibly wrong on both assumptions.
It didn’t take me long to fail out of SCAD. I started in the Fall of 2015, and was out mid-Spring quarter of 2016. There are a lot of reasons for my dropping out, but today I mostly attribute it to a lack of emotional maturity on my end. I wasn’t prepared to work hard for what I loved. I expected success to come naturally.
Well, it didn’t. And I had a long drive home to Athens, Georgia to think about the future. I don’t think a lot got accomplished on that drive home, but at the very least, it was the start to a new beginning.
The next few years after that day feel both blindingly fast and dreadfully slow. I moved out of my parents’ house shortly after moving back in with them (to their enormous relief.) I got an apartment and a job at a hotel in Athens. I resumed taking classes, very slowly at first. I had to relearn how to go to school considering the only aspect of school that I liked, acting, was no longer as much of an option for me.
And then life happened. I fell in love, moved to West Palm Beach, got dumped, and moved back in with my parents, who were living in St. Simons. For anyone keeping score at home, that’s approximately 2 “rock-bottoms” over the course of about 3 years. I continued working through classes, very slowly, and entirely online.
After moving back from West Palm, I reconnected with my best friend from SCAD, a young man named Colin McHugh. A sequential artist, he explained to me that he was working on a comic book idea about a musician, and he needed my help with some aspects of it, considering that I play guitar and he does not. This discussion quickly turned into a full-fledged writing partnership, and I soon moved back to Savannah in order to work on this project with him as much as possible. This project, a comic book titled “The Ballad of Gordon Barleycorn,” received a publishing deal in early 2021 and is scheduled to be in stores in 2022.
Meanwhile, during the pandemic, I found myself itching to get back onto a campus. I had been dutifully completing classes online for some time by that point, and I noticed that Georgia Southern was offering a Communication Studies degree on its newly acquired Armstrong Campus here in Savannah. I thought that sounded like a great way to finish up college.
I had no idea how right I was. Since beginning my experience at Armstrong in the Fall 2020 semester, my life has been full of amazing people. Armstrong has been full of rich opportunities and people who urge each other to succeed, and celebrate them when they do. I’ve been able to feel like part of a community, where everyone can find creative ways to benefit each other and contribute to a culture of inclusion and positivity.
Armstrong has been kind enough to give me the chance to be a leader for our student newspaper, The George-Anne Inkwell. Beginning as a staff writer, I was promoted to editor more or less by default going into the Fall 2021 semester. I say “by default” because nobody else had applied for the position. And with no other staff writers, that meant that the entire paper would have to be done by me and my co-editor, Rebecca Munday. Between the two of us, we had to write the entire paper, release a weekly newsletter, recruit new staff, and cover events ourselves. All while being full time students.
Fortunately, we did it, and we found new staff along the way. I’m extremely excited for the Spring of 2022, as I should have a full team of writers and other contributors working alongside me to make our newspaper as good as it can possibly be. It’ll be my last semester as a college student, I’ll be graduating in May, but I have a real opportunity to leave the Inkwell in a better state than which I found it, and that means everything to me.
I’ve learned that as a rule, things cannot go as we expect. This would mean that the world out there is limited by our own expectations, and that’s a foolish thing to assume. The world is so much scarier than our expectations, more brutal, less forgiving. But so much more awesome. When we rise to meet the world, when we accept it for how scary it is, we become something that can meet that terror. We can be leaders.
That’s what I want to be. As much fun as acting is and was, leadership is a much more appealing option to me now. I’ve made a hilarious amount of mistakes, so I can be useful in helping others avoid those same ones. I have the ability to use my failings to empower others. That seems like a pretty interesting sort of chemistry, and I plan to pursue that idea until it breeds tangible and hopefully fantastic results.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has most certainly not been a smooth road.
Dropping out of SCAD was not a happy time. My entire identity had been built around being an actor. When I failed at that, I failed at being myself. In order to survive, I had to begin to rebuild my identity.
That process was not even halfway accomplished when I failed at my relationship in West Palm Beach. Anyone who’s gone through a difficult breakup can relate, but the feeling of moving out of my girlfriend’s place and back in with my parents is not something I’d recommend to anyone, but it happened and it toughened me up.
That’s when I really began to take my future seriously. I began exercising, eventually leading to me changing my diet and losing over sixty pounds of unwanted weight. As much as this benefitted me physically, it was even better for my mental health.
As painful as the dropout and the breakup were when they occurred, I’m really glad they happened, that I didn’t just tune out of those parts of my life. Experiencing extreme academic failure and then extreme personal failure only separated by a year or two really made me realize that I had to take things more seriously. Every day I compare myself to the person who dropped out of SCAD and the person who got their heartbroken in West Palm Beach, and every day I can confidently say that I am miles ahead of those versions of myself.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I consider myself a writer. I write lots of things in a wide variety of contexts. I write nonfiction news stories for my school paper, The George-Anne Inkwell, and the same day I might write an issue for my comic book, “The Ballad of Gordon Barleycorn” which I can assure you is the farthest thing imaginable from nonfiction.
What I love about writing is the storytelling aspect. I cannot state it enough: I love stories so much. Stories capture the human imagination, they demand our attention, and they teach us so much. In my current capacity within the Inkwell, storytelling allows me to inform members of my community on happenings that may truly impact or interest them. It also allows me to give a voice to people who may not have had a voice previously, an aspect that cannot be overstated. Non-fictional storytelling translates the chaos of real life into narrative, and gives us light in the darkness, allowing us to see things that we were previously blind to, or that were perhaps being kept hidden from us.
Writing fiction allows me to venture into the unknown and make new discoveries. A good piece of fiction is a magical thing: Where nothing used to exist, there is now something, and it may make us laugh, cry, or experience some other emotion that we would not have felt that day otherwise. It wakes us up to human experience. We could be sitting on our couch, and a story pops on the TV, and it might change our lives. That is powerful to me. That’s a worthy cause. That’s why I write.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
Get excited when you fail. A lot of people say to not be afraid of failure, and that’s not bad advice, but it’s only half of the story. To not be afraid of failure is to not understand it. Failure has consequences, and usually, that consequence is time. It can take a long time to clean up a mess.
But time spent cleaning up your failures is infinitely more valuable than time spent doing nothing.
Back in the good ole days, before the internet and whatnot, failure was the only way to learn. Trial and error was the only prescribed method when there was no prior knowledge to go off of. Today, we have more information than we know what to do with. Every method has seemingly been tried and tested.
So you should be EXCITED when you fail! Because that means you’re exploring! You may even discover a thing or two along the way! And boy is that really exciting, because every discovery means the potential for new failures, new avenues of exploration.
And the more you fail, the better it feels when you finally, somehow, against all odds, don’t. And you’ll know when it happens.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://www.scoutcomics.com/collections/the-ballad-of-gordon-barleycorn
- Instagram: instagram.com/duncan.slidaho
- Other: https://thegeorgeanne.com/category/inkwell/
Image Credits
Duncan Sligh
Brett Davis
Brett Davis
