I’ve been a professional writer, editor & publisher all my adult life, a literature and philosophy major in college (way back when), a dedicated poet in my teens, and a tiny-book writer and self-publisher (before anyone had a name for it) as a grader-schooler.

I’ve written 5 books (beyond my tiny-books) — 2 professional, 2 novels and 1 memoir.

My first novel, INCOGNITO, was drafted in my 20s and completed in my early 30s, an offspring of my college years — complex to the max in the tradition of Pynchon, Garcia Marquez, Borges, and all the postmoderns I’d read, as well as saturated with philosophy from the pre-Socratics, to the toga-wearing Greeks, to St. Augustine, to Montaigne, to Descartes and friends, to Heisenberg, ‎Gödel and Escher (w/ Bach playing in the background). Pynchon was a particular influence, given I wrote my senior paper in college on his recently published 1974 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow.

On the back cover I describe Incognito this way: “a kaleidoscopic, quixotic story — perhaps one tale, perhaps 1,001, mixing fact and fiction told from a dozen voices, a Russian doll structure of stories within stories nestled within stories, adorned with signs and puzzles, mazes and chess, immersed in Dante and Shakespeare, classical mythology and Eastern thought, and echoing Pynchon, Barth, Borges, Paul Auster, and David Foster Wallace — that searches for answers and makes you wonder, ‘Are there only questions?’”

In 1989-91, I wrote, designed & typeset 2 books on commercial real estate for a national association.

My second novel, MONHEGAN WINDOWS, was published in 2009, almost 12 years after I initiated the idea, which was instigated by reading the Bridges of Madison County. I loathed the writing, but loved the idea of the story of a visual artist (with their art incorporated into the book), a traveler, a person grounded in a strong sense of place. I was also inspired by the 2-track narrative concept of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The result: “a novel about loss, transition, healing and the magic of art and storytelling, presented in two interlaced stories” set on “a remote Maine enclave 10 miles off the coast . . . a summertime artists’ colony, hiking paradise, birdwatching mecca and vacation destination.”

The book was also a reaction to my own first novel, my attempt to write “a simple summer read,” as I state on the back cover, though I was unable to resist “add[ing] layers with each passing page until the reader comfortably inhabits, through a subtle Escher-like twist, an island where metafiction and magic realism, imagination and illusion are as natural as the forest trees, the wildflowers and the surf crashing on the picture-postcard cliffs.”

My newest book-length work, published this year, is a memoir-plus, A MEMORY MOSAIC. Gestating over a dozen years, it started out as a simple telling of the trek I took way back in 1980 in the Himalayan foothills with an unusual friend of mine. It became an unexpected journey into the writing of one’s memoir, as well as a meditation on time & memory and an exhortation and cheering section for memoirists, aspiring and experienced.

Outside of my books, my professional writing career began in the 1980s, when I was a prolific freelance feature writer. Miscellaneous fact: The biggest feature — a 10,000-word cover story for The Chicago Reader on behind the scenes of the 8 1/2-hour play Nicholas Nickleby — was also my introduction to writing on a computer . . . an Apple IIe, in December 1982. I wrote the first 5,000 words in one afternoon, then followed the procedure to save . . . and had it all disappear! After a sad, sad dinner, I stayed up until 1am, having gotten myself to the same 5,000-word point I’d been at at 6pm. Despite the rough start, I have since then always been a computer-based writer.

The freelancing dropped away when I began a newsletter-publishing business. In its first iteration from 1990 to 2010, I published about 950 issues of customized newsletters for office buildings and office parks, each issue having at least one feature about a tenant. The business began to shift in 2008 into serving the hospice and funeral-home industries, providing bereavement newsletters.