The Wacky World of Jamie Potter: Author, Illustrator, Musician, and More
Written by Laticia Headings
As a kid, Jamie Potter would amble through the woods and splash in the waters of the Long Island Sound near his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was the perfect setting for adventure — an intersection between a fantastical playground and physical dreamscape. “It’s where all my stories began, exploring the tide pools and going into forests where we would find old ruins of things deep down in the earth. Having that freedom planted a seed for a lot of my work,” he says.
Potter’s professional endeavors come in many creative forms — musician, illustrator, songwriter, and, more recently, award-winning author of a young adult book series centered around a 13-year-old mortician’s apprentice with a penchant for ghostly detective work. “Thomas Creeper and the Gloomsbury Secret,” his debut novel, was released in 2019 and won the Kraken Prize for Middle-Grade Fiction.
Two years later, the sequel, “Thomas Creeper and the Purple Corpse,” was released and shortlisted for the 2023 Stoker Award for Young Adult Fiction, an honor voted on by bestselling authors of horror.
“The first book got me out there in the world and set up a model of the town,” says the 41-year-old, who goes by the pen name J.R. Potter. “The weird town of Gloomsbury I’ve created is loosely based on my hometown, all of the old robber baron money that was in New England during the Victorian era, and shiftiness behind the scenes.”
The sequel, published by Black Rose Writing, continues Thomas’ journey into the otherworldly. “In this book, I explored the physics and mechanics of the supernatural world and played with the rules. Things like can ghosts talk to other ghosts? That was really fun,” says Potter, who is currently narrating the audiobook and voicing all the characters. It’s an experience he describes as “challenging and wonderful,” adding, “I love writing lyrically and poetically to make the sentences fun to read out loud.”
Thomas, the curious protagonist, is both an amalgamation of and an homage to Potter’s younger self. “There is a golden time around fourth, fifth, sixth grade that I go back to and am in touch with,” Potter admits, adding that middle and high school held challenges for him. “You’re sort of avenging that younger, insecure part of yourself in a way.”
Potter grew up feasting on comic books and devouring John Bellairs’ gothic mysteries. “I love a book because it forces us to be present,” Potter says. It was through this literature that he learned how to intersect “terror, humor, and heart” into his own budding writing career.
“When I was 9, I created my own newspaper called Greenwich Weird, which was about ghost sightings. ‘The X Files’ had just come out, and that show that rocked my world,” says Potter, whose first job was fittingly a paper route. “Not much has changed. I still really love telling a supernatural, tantalizing, wacky tale.
“I was very lucky to grow up in a family of artists and art enthusiasts,” he continues. His parents, who met in art school, often took him and his older brother to New York City for Broadway shows, theater performances, and visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “All those amazing experiences just electrified me. That changed my life and created a lasting impression.”
Though art was important, Potter’s early aspirations were more academic. With the goal of becoming a teacher in his hometown, he immersed himself in history books and ancient mythology, majoring in history at Brown University.
After college, he shifted paths into hospitality and became a restaurant manager, and still works several nights a week at a local Middleburg eatery. “I love restaurants because you get some great character studies,” Potter laughs.
Though he didn’t end up in a classroom, Potter’s work inspires kids around the country. His new literacy-based series, called “Cowbots,” is designed to build word vocabulary and teach sentence structure. “My whole platform is based on wonder and literacy,” Potter says. “I gauge my success on how many young readers I can get excited about books — my books or other books — and keep them reading, thinking, and dreaming.”
In March of 2023, Potter was accepted into one of the top 10 artist residencies, Chateau Orquevaux in France, where he spent 13 days with artists of various disciplines. His work there earned him the Denis Diderot Emerging Artist Award.
“Kirby Hart Vs. The Moss Men” is Potter’s latest young adult series, a thrilling 1950s-Hollywood-monsters-meets-STEM-robotics story. In the future, he would like his books to have a video game component and ultimately find their way to the big screen.
Potter, now a resident of Upperville, is closely connected to music, too, singing and playing five instruments. In college, “I kind of majored in rock and roll. I had a band called The Good Days,” he shares. It was then that he discovered a passion for bluegrass music and pursued an internship with Smithsonian Folkways, a nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. “I didn’t get paid, but I got to take as many records home as I wanted, which was a dream,” Potter remembers. “I call myself ‘poly-jammerous’ because I love so many different types of music!”
Potter regularly draws crowds at venues around Hunt Country. He performs both solo and with The Crooked Angels, a band he and his wife, Amy, formed together. The couple has released two albums, “Bread & Bourbon” (2016) and “Indian Summer” (2017), blending their voices with a soulful mix of country, blues, and Americana.
“It’s very hard to sum up what I do because I love to do a lot of things. I’m not one thing. There’s a prism of various versions of myself,” Potter notes.
Some might say he is living out his childhood dreams, a sentiment with which Potter wouldn’t disagree. “What’s exciting about standing at the intersection of many communities, a lot of crafts, and a lot of different approaches is that the view is never the same.” ML
For more information on Potter’s work, visit jamesrobertpotter.com.
Featured photo by Shannon Ayres.
Published in the October 2024 issue of Middleburg Life.