Today we’d like to introduce you to Brian Peace.
Hi Brian, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I am a 54-year-old, retired IT help desk professional and high school English teacher with four children and one grandchild. Upon leaving the corporate world in the mid-2000s and my retirement from teaching immediately after the COVID lockdowns, I began seeking out new employment. Thus, I became a full-time, professional Santa, substitute teacher, and bookshop entertainer and associate at the Georgia Renaissance Festival.
While I was able to make a living, I wanted jobs that provided edification for my spiritual well-being, as well. One day, I wondered idly what it would take to become a professional tarot reader and reiki practitioner at Phoenix and Dragon Bookshop, so I stopped in. As it happened, they were just beginning the process of hiring a new practitioner. Being a regular, most of the employees already knew me, so it was an easy process to join the team.
I also embarked on a journey as a death doula. I had fostered a few people through the death process over the course of my life, so that transition, likewise, seemed to come to me easily. I have counselled people, helped with funeral arrangements, provided care, and worked on life reviews for people with terminal illnesses from diagnosis through death and aftercare of family members. Death can be a difficult process, so being able to help foster people through the process is a rather rewarding endeavor.
I am currently seeking my master’s degree in religious studies at Georgia State University.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Returning as an adult to achieve both my English Education degree in 2012 and to begin my current master’s endeavors this past year has been a challenge. I am the first person in my immediate family to achieve a degree from an accredited university, so I had no experienced familial support in that endeavor. While acquiring my bachelor’s degree, I had to navigate being the parent of four children as well as providing care for my mother who was on hospice through her death in 2010 in the middle of my studies.
I also found myself between teaching positions during the COVID lockdown while I provided hospice care to my older brother who was on hospice since VA facilities were not accepting new patients. Handling that process, family visits, and my post-death executorship duties during that time was a huge challenge.
In late August of 2025, I was travelling from the Hyatt Regency where I had picked up my Dragon Con Art Show volunteer badge and was travelling back to the GSU campus when a scooter threw me. I broke my hand, received a concussion, dislocated my clavicle, and have a fourth-degree tear of my spleen. I spent eleven days at Grady Memorial Hospital in Intensive Care and Acute Care until my eventual release. I have since had two surgeries to repair my spleen and reattach my clavicle. In December 2025, I began the physical therapy stage of my healing process.
During the last few months, I have had to struggle with my own sense of mortality in a more visceral and immediate sense than I have had to in my dealings with others facing death. It has given me empathy from an inside perspective that I lacked before that day. I am grateful on a daily basis that I was given a chance to recover and that my injuries, while life threatening, were not a terminal diagnosis. I cherished my family and friends before but have an even greater degree of appreciation for those relationships today.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I have found that I enjoy the ability to pursue a variety of interests much more than working a 9-5 job in either the corporate world or in education. No two days are the same, and many of my jobs are temporary or seasonal in nature. I am even working as a teacher’s assistant and in the Writing Across the Curriculum department at GSU to further complicate my schedule. I keep myself busier than in my younger years, but I feel even more fulfilled than I did in other, more stable employments. I have also taken up hand carving wands and wood spirits in my spare time and selling them at the occasional metaphysical event as time allows. I make almost as much as when I was a teacher, but the diminished pay is insignificant compared to the life satisfaction I feel in my current life. I feel like I provide service to the public, the universe, and myself in equal measure, and that is most edifying.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Definitely as sense of service. What I do allows me to give to others in a way that is recognized and appreciated in ways that I never experienced in my previous life. Those attributes are important when provided by outside sources, but they are just as valuable when you feel them intrinsically as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nightravenarts.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bpeace71/
