"Writing fiction is the most interesting and challenging thing I've ever tried.
It keeps teaching me things I didn't know I didn't know."
I’ve been writing in one form or another since composing my first poem when I was ten years old, inspired by the snow fall that cancelled school. Although storytelling came early, my professional life led me to the chemical industry, where I still managed to find opportunities to write (promotional literature, technical papers, patents).
After retiring from my career as a specialist in adhesive formulation and processing, I published Eighty-eight Keys, a collection of poems and song lyrics written over the years. The project rekindled my long-standing interest in creative writing, and I decided to take on a new challenge: the novel.
I spent the next few years studying the craft of fiction before publishing my first novel, Ambiguous. The idea for the story grew out of a summer trip to Paris with my three teenage children and follows a widowed mother who uncovers unsettling secrets from her late husband's past, forcing her to face long-held prejudices.
In 2020, during the pandemic, I published The un-Natural Aging Process, a coming-of-age mystery shaped by the time and place of my own youth in the cave country of south-central Kentucky. My most recent book, The Twelve Sisters, a mystery-thriller set in Italy, was written with co-author David Thompson Dorris.
My current work in progress is a novel inspired by real events, exploring the difficult choices parents face while raising a child with profound disabilities—and the deeper question of what truly makes a life meaningful.
Although writing occupies the bulk of my free time, I still enjoy my other hobbies: finger-style guitar, abstract painting, tai chi, photography, travel, and reading about forty novels a year. I recorded an album of fourteen original Americana songs titled Another Man's Treasure. Winters find me writing at our home on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, and when the northeastern US snows retreat, in the Philadelphia area.