Our Story

​

Manuscript illumination, calligraphy, and Medieval book arts have long been a passion of mine, but I went down a long and circuitous path to come to the place where it is now a major focus of my life. I enlisted in the US Navy at age 17 with the dream of becoming a Navy SEAL. The following summer I suffered a severe heatstroke during 1st phase of BUD/S (SEAL training) and got sent to serve out my enlistment in the surface fleet. This seemed like something of a prison sentence to me, so far from the job I had always envisioned myself doing, so as soon as my enlistment ended I transferred to the US Army and volunteered for Airborne school and Ranger selection (then called RIP). After graduation I served as an infantry team leader in the 3rd Ranger Battalion, and had an absolute blast finally deploying to do the missions I always wanted to do.

​

As much as I loved the Army, times and culture were changing. My home culture had changed a lot too; by this time I was married with four children. We were homeschooling our young children, and I knew I wanted to be more available to build a more robust home environment and input more with my children's education. I got out of the military in 2013, but due to very particular nature of my marketable skills at the time, I was soon deploying again for 9 months out of the year as a private contractor for the US State Department, during which time I finally finished the college degree I had been chipping away at for years. In 2017 I began teaching at the small private school my older children attended (I had 6 by this point). I was thrilled to teach and to finally be able to spend significant time with my children, contributing to their education at the level I always wanted to. It was a major pay-cut, though, and with my salary falling far short of my monthly bills with a family of 8 and 1 more on the way, I decided to turn my long-time hobby of calligraphy, illuminated art, and bookbinding into a side-business and so I started Tamburn Bindery to specialize in unique artistic texts and medieval-style books. Since 2024 I have been self-employed, doing the manuscript art and book publishing full time, and we have once again been homeschooling our children, starting the Tamburn Woods Forest School to invite other children into the beautiful nature of our learning environment, while also developing the courses and programs we will be using in the classical school when it's ready to open.

​​