I grew up in dairy country, loved it and wanted to leave. The latter part of that conundrum won out. My adventure years, my odd-job years, lasted a full decade after I finished college. I waited tables in Tucson; built Navy crates in Hawaii; drove a refrigerated truck in Florida; was an industrial photographer in San Francisco, a laborer in Southern California, a gandy dancer on the Soo Line Railroad; a law student in Manhattan.
The work didn’t make me a writer—the living did, the people and places. Reading and writing and rewriting. And law school. I’ve known other writers who felt that graduate studies stymied their creative flow; but for me the study of law, the requisite clarity of thought, was exactly what I needed to balance my lyrical impulse.
It was rhyme that got me hooked on writing, the simple poems we read in outdated books in my country school. When I started to fabricate sentences, there he was, a more interesting person inside myself than I had ever seen in the mirror. The idea of audience, of working, reworking the words, inviting the reader to join me, to come along, became paramount—this is my task as a writer as I understand it.
The years of practicing law in New York City and on Long Island are over. I now live with my wife Eileen in a farmhouse ten miles from where I grew up. Winters we spend in Florida, in Sarasota, in a condo across from Siesta Key.
I’m the author of chapbooks (five), have won poetry awards (three). But for me the importance is still forthcoming: to wit, Skylighting, my long-gestated novella that Regal House has scheduled to publish. My work celebrates the senses, mostly sight and touch; it gives thought and feelings a physical presence. When I have written the way I want to write, I know that something strange has happened.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Skylighting as part of our Fall 2025 Frontlist season.
