It’s a Wednesday night at a brewery in Ballard. Forest Ember dances joyfully on stage as two audience members come up to join her. The theme for the first round, she announces, is “bread.”

“Well, the ‘yeast’ I can do is get this started,” one competitor quips.

“I ‘crust’ it won’t be too hard,” the other responds.

“I hope I’m not ‘crumby’ at it.”

“Oh, ‘baguette’ about it.”

This is a pun slam – a goofy, joyful, and sometimes cringeworthy celebration of wordplay where people riff and compete to build a conversation peppered with puns. “It’s just magical – the environment and the energy of people celebrating puns in this safe space to be corny and dorky,” says Forest.

And it’s a growing business for her. She now hosts Pun Intended Pun Slams three times a month at venues in Seattle and Olympia. She also has a job she loves working with students who – like herself – face extra barriers to succeeding in college. And after many years of renting, she now has a home of her own – in a former mini-school bus she converted into a tiny home herself.

But just seven years ago, Forest was unemployed, living in constant pain, and at risk of becoming homeless. She eventually overcame all that and went on to accomplish so much more. But she says today she was only able to do it all because she got some help building a few months of stability at a critical time in her trajectory. “My life completely turned around after I connected with Solid Ground,” she says. “It just made me feel like I had someone in my corner who had my back – and made me feel safe and not suicidal.”

When your work equals self-worth

Forest loves to be busy and gets a lot of joy out of work, whether as an advocate supporting folks at a homeless shelter or a bartender slinging drinks in SODO. But in 2016, she’d just started a dream job on Amtrak’s Empire Builder line when everything fell apart. After just a few months pulling a big lever to open doors, she began to feel pain in her shoulder that soon became utterly debilitating. Eventually diagnosed with a torn rotator cuff, she learned she couldn’t do anything about it except physical therapy and wait for it to heal.

“My life completely turned around after I connected with Solid Ground. It just made me feel like I had someone in my corner who had my back.” ~Forest Ember, Pun Intended Pun Slam producer & student outreach coordinator

In the meantime, she couldn’t collect unemployment and didn’t qualify for workers comp, so her savings quickly evaporated. Told she was healthy enough to do “light work,” she had no options without a college degree or any experience beyond manual labor.

Unable to work, she started sinking into a deep, immobilizing depression. “I was at home, depressed, sobbing all the time,” she says. “I couldn’t go anywhere I was in so much pain – but I also wouldn’t let myself sit outside in the sun because I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I realized I’d gotten such a sense of worth from working.”

Sometimes systems hurt, not help, those they’re meant to support

Forest eventually connected with a wonderful therapist, who encouraged her to apply for government programs until she found one that she qualified for: Housing and Essential Needs (HEN). It provided rent assistance, a gas card enabling her to drive to a part-time job, and other essentials like toilet paper and toothpaste. It took a few months to get HEN benefits, but eventually she found the stability she needed to heal without worrying about becoming homeless.

But after just seven months, Forest got notice that her benefits would end in two weeks – months earlier than she expected. Rent was due and she had no other way to pay it. She appealed but was denied. “I felt just livid and completely baffled that this was how the system works,” she says. “It’s just setting people up to fail, the whole system, even when they’re trying to help us.”

Finally feeling seen – and supported

At this point, Forest found Solid Ground’s Benefits Legal Assistance (BLA). For more than 20 years, BLA attorneys have helped people gain and maintain the state benefits they need to survive and thrive.

BLA attorneys “… were instantly helpful. I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got some people who have experience and knowledge, and they’re going to help me.’ … I’m forever grateful. They made me feel like they had my back, and that I wasn’t alone.” ~Forest 

BLA provides free legal services to low-income adults and families in King County. “They were instantly helpful,” Forest says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got some people who have experience and knowledge, and they’re going to help me.” With some work, the BLA team got Forest’s benefits restored to the full year she expected plus a few more months.

This made all the difference. With stability restored, she got to appointments with her doctors, therapist, and workforce training programs. With a gas card from HEN, she could drive to Olympia to apply for college – which eventually led to her current outreach coordinator job and the chance to build her own tiny home. “It meant everything,” she says. “It gave me hope and it made me feel seen and heard and cared for.”

A safe space to be silly

During this time, Forest also discovered pun slams while traveling. She brought the idea back to Seattle, partnered with someone else at first, then started producing pun slams on her own.

She has a gift for it – creating a disarmingly safe space through the sheer power of joyful energy. She empowers people to be their silliest. “I’m just really goofy and love to laugh, and my brain sorta thinks in puns anyhow,” she says.

What Solid Ground did for Forest may seem small, but it meant enough to her that she now donates a portion of proceeds from every pun slam to the agency and proudly shouts out her support on her website and at events. “I’m forever grateful,” she says. “They made me feel like they had my back, and that I wasn’t alone.”

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• Image at top: Forest (left) and Robin the Arithmechick (right) get the crowd pumped up (photo by Neal Simpson).

• Want to catch a pun slam with Forest? Go to punintendedpunslam.com to find out about upcoming events.