Hello reader and thanks for stopping by. I sincerely hope my work touches you in some way. How I began my writing journey in not a complicated or unusual tale. I have always been drawn to creating with words. In fifth grade, I began staying inside during recess to write stories. I didn’t care about the taunts of “nerd,” because once my pencil hit the paper it never stopped flying until the bell rang. I wish I’d kept those notebooks. I do remember one entry was entitled “Peanut Butter and Peas.”

Although I wanted to study creative writing in college, it was the late 1970s and my parents believed that writing was something better done as a hobby. They advised choosing a degree with more employment potential. I graduated with a degree in Professional Accountancy, followed that with a Juris Doctorate, jobs, and young children, all along promising myself that someday I would take the time to write “for real.”

One afternoon, with children in college and high school, I was sitting at my desk playing a mindless hidden object game on my computer, and it hit me like a cascade of bricks. What am I doing? I immediately deleted the game and opened a new document. The first line I wrote: “I hope your life doesn’t turn out to be a big, fat, waste of time…”

My prose and poetry is about daily human life, the small moments in the hometowns of contemporary America. Through my work, I hope to celebrate the unique characteristics of close-knit communities, shared family histories, local war heroes, larger-than-life characters.  I am interested in exploring the concept of home, whether that is a city, suburbia, rural life, the far future. Why does one person leave while another stays? Why do some people go back? What haunts those who never do? 

I can’t sign off without mentioning someone I have never forgotten. I was attending a summer semester at Penn State University, and I had squeezed in a creative writing class. One day, this professor stood up in front of the class and read a story I had written about my oldest brother drawing an ominous number in the Vietnam draft. He was quick to mention my work was far from perfect, but he did say “it was damn good.” After class, he asked about my declared major. When I told him what it was, he said, “you can always rethink that,” and wished me luck. This is another theme in my writing. How so often one person, one word, one small gesture can change someone else’s life forever. 

I have been fortunate to have published nearly 100 pieces in literary magazines including CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost Magazine, Broadkill Review, Two Thirds North, Hawaii Pacific Review, Sky Island Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, Evening Star Review and Streetlight Magazine. Nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for Best of the Net, in 2019, I won The Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction. I am grateful.

My poetry chapbooks The Werewolves of Elk Creek and Shot Full of Holes are available from Moonstone Press. My work in five anthologies and my debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House is available on Amazon.

For further reading, check out my recommendations for the best books to leave you spellbound.