Biography
Roots and Early Life
I grew up in Lawrenceville, Illinois, a small oil and gas refinery town, in deep southern Illinois near the Kentucky boarder. It was just across the Wabash River where Abraham Lincoln crossed into Illinois, his family slept on the town’s courthouse lawn, on their way to Springfield. My family’s roots are part of the Trans Appalachian migration from western Kentucky. Leaving Kentucky left its scars on my grandparents, and had no small effect on my parents and my hometown.
I too migrated of sorts after my father’s death when I was 15 – I ran away from home, lived adrift for a good part of a year, and ended up talking my way into a scholarship at a prestigious college prep boarding school, Lake Forest Academy. The path forward from there was on the surface an educational success, but the family dysfunction followed me in silence.
My Education Journey
- Lake Forest Academy-Ferry Hall School (1975)
- B.A. – St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota (1978), Philosophy and Ancient Studies
- J.D. – University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana (1982)
- M.A. – University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota (2007) Thesis: Mauriac and Kierkegaard and the Art of Indirect Communication in Literature
- M.A. – University of St. Thomas, Creative Writing and Publishing (2022) Concentration: The Serial Short Story and Non-Fiction Memoir
From Law to Literature
After forty years as a commercial real estate and corporate lawyer, I’ve returned to my first love—writing and storytelling. Literature was never far from my mind, even during my legal career, and in retirement, I’ve devoted myself to the craft of short fiction and memoir.
A New Chapter
In 2022, I completed my second master’s degree and fully embraced a new chapter—writing full-time. The stories I once kept to myself have become the foundation of a lifelong project: to tell my truth as I remember it, one short story at a time. Maybe others who have faced down similar obstacles will see their hope in the survival.
Stories I Tell
My work centers on serial short stories that blend memoir and creative nonfiction, most notably in a collection titled “The Stories We Chose Not to Tell.” The first half explores surviving childhood trauma and the effects of complex PTSD; the second, learning to thrive beyond it.
An early piece, “The Sleepover That Changed Everything,” was published in the Summit Avenue Review and recounts the night my brother was killed by a drunk driver—seen through my seven-year-old eyes.
As Professor Matt Batt, a published author of two books of non-fiction, said , “Reading your work feels like sitting in a bar, listening to an engaging stranger tell the story of his life—and not quite believing it’s all true but you feel compelled to hang around to see how it all turns out.” My wife, Mary and I now live in Hopkins, Minnesota, blessed to be near our four children and six grandchildren.
