About me...

In preparing this web site, I’ve been trying to discover my own thematic threads.  In many forms and many genres, I write stories about relationships, usually a little broken.  I write stories about personal heroism, characters who work a bit too hard, love a bit too much, or are a bit too sassy for their own good. In many pieces of my work, mortality suddenly becomes all too apparent, and the fleeting moments of life suddenly become all too precious.

As an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, I immersed myself in literature, loving the spare elegant beauty of Hemingway and Hammett, glorying in the sheer word pleasure of Chandler, and diving into the intense complexities of Joyce. I wrote many short stories and a noir detective novel.

While earning my MFA from UCLA, I learned how passionately I love structure as I deconstructed countless films, and became familiar with the tools in the film and TV dramatist’s tool kit.  I wrote about a dozen scripts (mostly about the Vietnam War) and worked to find my voice and perfect my craft.

After UCLA I was privileged to work on numerous projects involving the stories of Louis L’Amour. I love Westerns. I love the edge of the frontier and the purity of the narrative arena. The technological limitations give a writer immense freedom in depicting energized, taut character drama. 

Dramatizing Louis’ short stories into one-hour radio plays was an invaluable apprenticeship into the art of writing for performance.  I was given a mandate to create scripts that worked well for a performed medium, so I learned to translate dialog that sounds good on paper into dialog that doesn’t sound artificial when spoken.  With each new script, I increasingly understood how deeply the words need to make sense to an actor, with every beat clearly and logically leading to the next.  Without a logical and muscular structure to a script, the words start to ring hollow as the actors feel the ground giving way beneath them. 

My lifelong work in theatre production gave me invaluable insight into how to write for the stage.  Calling a show innumerable times allowed me to hear all the variations of dialog and delivery and learn what worked with an audience.  When I wrote my first libretto, I pulled in all of that experience and wrote a love letter to the act of doing theatre, through the eyes of its backstage creators.

I’ve always been a fan of the personal essay.  For years I wrote one or two page “snippets” which were simply very short stories, or moments I wanted to capture, or juxtapositions that spoke to me.  Many of them have been lost, unfortunately, but I’ve captured a few of them in this site, in their entirety.

I am a seeker of truth, an adventurer of the spirit, and believe that living life fully is one of our few true imperatives as human beings.