Born in Philadelphia in 1991, Christopher McClatchy was immediately confronted with the precarity of life (not that he remembers much of it) as birth complications required him to be life flighted out of his mothers arms and on to a prepared surgical table. Having survived this, a life in suburban Philadelphia followed. Playing roller hockey in the streets, kickball in too-tiny yards, years passed punctuated by visits to family in Wildwood, New Jersey, Lake Muskoka, Canada, and Ketchum, Idaho - and these retreats to shore, lake, and mountains outside of the normal progression of time began the artist’s relationship to how time expands and contracts in relationship to space and locale. An affinity for storytelling and the written word developed at an early age, leading the artist to major in literature in college and continue his interest through editing and submitting to the university literary journal, Esprit, as well as being selected to receive university funds to attend a writer’s conference held by the Gettysburg Review. Having received multiple awards for poetry, the artist almost decided to pursue an MFA but bowed to financial pressures and dedicated himself to community work and to keeping his love of literature alive through various writing and reading groups he facilitated in his community, continuing to refine his art but no longer submitting to literary journals. In May of 2023, the artist was shocked out of this sense of normalcy by the discovery of a giant brain aneurysm - which after successful emergency neurosurgery enabled a period of reflection and rededication to the life sustaining art of poetry, as well as a renewed focus in finding ways to take poetry off of the page and place it into people’s lives. The artist, already entrenched in his community, seeks ways to deepen both his and his neighbors' sense of the intersection of language, time, and place.