Board Member Spotlight: Dan England
Writer, ultra runner, arts advocate
“You might remember me from such publications as The Greeley Tribune, where I covered Greeley’s vibrant arts scene for 20 years.
I can’t tell you how excited I am to become a Greeley Creative District board member.”
I don’t know if you ever watched “The Simpsons” — and if you didn’t, I really don’t know what you did with your Sunday nights, other than fritter them anyway on anything but the greatest show ever — but, there was a washed-up TV actor who would introduce himself by saying, “Hi, I’m Troy McClure, you might remember me…”
Well, hi, I’m Dan England.
You might remember me from such publications as The Greeley Tribune, where I covered Greeley’s vibrant arts scene for 20 years.
I can’t tell you how excited I am to become a Greeley Creative District board member. Newspapers discourage active participation on boards that can shape our community. We prefer to cover it instead. I respected this rule and understood it, but it was always frustrating to cover issues that were important to me and to not help. It felt like I was that person who leans over your shoulder and says, “You missed a spot” without ever rolling up their sleeves themselves.
I am now a freelancer writer for publications such as NoCO Style, BizWest, Colorado Sun, Colorado Outdoors and Wyoming Wildlife. I am also a big part of NoCO Optimist, a local online news publication with 500 subscribers that attempts to cover what we’re missing without extensive local news coverage. The Tribune’s resources have been cut to the bone — and in fairness, it’s the same cleaving that newspapers around the world have tried to overcome for years — and so Kelly Ragan, the founder, along with me and Trenton Sperry have tried to fill the gaps.
Greeley’s creative scene is extremely important to me, and there’s two reasons for that. The first, of course, is my life would suck without them. I am a musician. Music gave me a place in high school, and later, when I was in Salina, Kansas, working at my first job, theater gave me a pack, introducing me to people I still call friends. Writing is my job, still, and I am lucky for it. My wife, Valerie Vampola, is a singer by trade. A SINGER BY TRADE. You can actually do arts stuff for a LIVING even when your name isn’t Doja Cat.
The arts enrich our lives in trillions of ways that we don’t even realize, and I think the Greeley Creative District has as much to do with that as the many other important organizations, business owners and tireless volunteers who work, pay and pray to bring them to you. They have made my life a LOT better, and I haven’t even touched on how much metal music has added to my life (and I don’t even play it). Fortunately for you, I won’t do that here, other than to say completing one of my ultramarathons would be impossible without it.
The second reason? Oh, right. Sometimes I get distracted when I talk about myself. The second reason why Greeley’s arts scene is important to me is… Greeley is important to me, and Greeley’s arts scene separates it from most other northern Colorado cities.
Yes, yes, we all know how great Fort Collins, Estes Park, Boulder and, to an extent, Loveland are, right? We’ve heard all about it, and Greeley isn’t put in that category. But, we have the UNC/Greeley Jazz Festival, one of the oldest symphonies in the U.S. and the Blues Jam, and these three things alone are things that those other cities don’t have. We don’t have Horsetooth Mountain Open Space, Mount Sanitas or Devil’s Backbone, or Rocky Mountain National Park, for that matter, but we do have those things, and all of them are renowned across the country.
We have SO MANY arts things like that, in fact, it is easy to take them for granted. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you for a donation here. Just, you know, a little support. It’s a good idea to, if you can, maybe serve on a board that helps these things out. And if nothing else, GO to these things, at least some of these things. Friday Fest even lets you walk around with a drink while you listen to the many great bands playing for you. That’s as easy as it gets.