His Modest Debut

Derek Lamson is a child of the Pacific Northwest, and has lived all his life on Native land. As a boy, he cowboyed out in the desert, as a young man he logged and did commercial fishing. He worked in TV advertising in his thirties on the Oregon Coast and then Portland; started and crashed an ad business; and worked retail for Fred Meyer for eight years. In 2012, Derek went back to school to finish his BA, and went on to earn a Masters in Ed and teaching license. Throughout his life, Derek has written, shared, and published poems, stories, and songs. In 1990 he became a Quaker follower of Jesus; subsequently he has written, performed and recorded four albums of original progressive christian gospel, folk, and blues. A Month of Sundays, a collaborative anthology of his new and uncollected work, began monthly releases June 2022, with plans to drop songs up to June 2023: music collection number five. In 2017, Derek edited and collected his younger poetry into a book called His Modest Debut: Poems 1970s and 1980s and released it through Amazon. That same year (and also Amazon) he published his young adult novella King David and the Desert Harp. Back in Eugene since 2018, Derek is currently staying busy with his (large) Eugene family; his day job as a substitute teacher in Lane County; worship and activism; and always music and writing.