Xhazzie Kindle was born in Kensington, London, England, and was raised mostly south of the river in Herne Hill. She said she knew from a young age that she wanted to see the world.
“The funny thing about London is: It’s a big city, huge city, but even so, one’s world is so small. One knows the kids on one’s street and the kids in one’s school, and I always knew that it wasn’t big enough for me,” Kindle said. “I needed to go farther. I needed to explore more.”
She joked that she once had an ambition to go to a country for every letter of the alphabet. Kindle said she’s gotten about halfway through that alphabetical bucket list, but “there’s a lot more places I’d like to go.”
When reflecting on her journey to the United States, Kindle said she first came here in 1989. She spent about six months in Ipswich and another six months in Wellesley before returning to England, but Kindle said it was in 1999 that she made a conscious decision to settle down in Marblehead.
“I had no intention of settling in Marblehead. I honestly didn’t think that I would put down roots here,” Kindle said, reflecting on how she was actually planning to leave, “but I met my husband. We got married, and I sort of count that as the date that I put down the roots because, until then, I was still very transient in my own mind.”
To her, settling down looked like: buying a house, getting a “real job,” having her twins, who are now 18, and becoming a U.S. citizen. She also got involved in local politics and with Marblehead schools and community organizations, like the Marblehead Arts Association (MAA), where she is now the executive director.
“That really, in a game in my own mind, locked me in,” Kindle said about joining the MAA team in 2015.
She had originally wanted to be a pilot and studied aviation sciences at North Shore Community College when “very inconveniently, I lost my vision.”
“When I say I lost my vision, I lost like half of the vision in each eye. Now, I thought I was having a stroke. It was terrifying,” Kindle said. “But it turns out that it’s a really common condition called ocular migraine, and I don’t know what the trigger is, but every now and again, I simply just can’t see.
“The way I describe it is: It’s like looking through a broken mirror. You can see everything as you move your head, but you can’t think at the same time. For a pilot, that perhaps has the potential to end badly. If it happens when I’m driving, I can pull over to the side of the road and wait until it passes, but if you’re flying, that’s pretty much the end of that, so I had to switch gears.”
Kindle explained that she worked for a marketing company for a little bit and then became a professional organizer, but her “passion still stayed with art.” She said she’s “always been creative” and that she’s “always been easily inspired by other people’s creativity.”
While her twins were young, she picked up a behind-the-desk job at MAA three days/week, but she wound up needing to pull back from MAA to be a present mom. Once her kids were older, she said MAA asked for her to return, and she did.
Her work with MAA has allowed her to uphold her New Year’s resolutions, which she said are the same every year: “Drink more water, and take a class (to) learn something new.”
Kindle added that “one of the joys of working” at MAA is that she’s able to learn new skills, new techniques that allow her to create art in new ways and refine her skills. She said that she was primarily a fiber artist and mostly knitted or crocheted, but she’s been able to expand into ceramics, watercolor and other mediums.
MAA was founded in 1922, making the organization a whopping 103 years old. Kindle said “being part of an organization that’s been run almost entirely by volunteers is a privilege.”
“That’s a testament to all the people who came before me who gave their time and their efforts and their passion to keep it going,” Kindle said.
She added that, “coming from a big city,” it’s easy to see “how quickly change happens.”
“There are new buildings. There are new roads, and England has changed so much that when I go back now, I feel like a tourist in my own home,” Kindle said. “One of the things I love about Marblehead is that it hasn’t changed that much. People say that it’s changed, but I like that it’s authentic. The roads have never been straightened. They kept the architecture, especially in Old Town, as authentic as it could be.
“Change is good, but so is tradition.”
