Hi!

I’m currently working on a new online course- a set of wrestling plays from Von Baumann, which Jessica Finley has interpreted, and we shot together in July this year. It’s a fascinating little mini-system embedded in the larger treatise. Watch this space…

Speaking of online courses, I’m working out ways to open up my platforms to other instructors. I have two services for distributing courses: teachable, and swordpeople.com. These cost several thousand dollars a year to maintain, which is a barrier to other historical fencing teachers who are perhaps earlier on in their career or have smaller followings.

My goal is to make the best historical fencing material available to my people, and not limit that to the work I can do myself. It’s also good to expose my people to the work of other instructors- when I ran my school in Finland we averaged 3-4 guest instructor seminars per year. If I can find the right way to do it, it’s a triple win: the students get access to material they wouldn’t otherwise see; the instructor gets to make a better living communicating their material; and my own platform also grows.

I’m not one to plan everything down to the last flicker of an eyelash, so I’ve invited my first guest instructor to host a course on my teachable platform.