Short Stories
The Sleepover That Changed Everything
What began as an ordinary childhood sleepover became the night that split my life into Before and After. I was seven years old when a drunk driver took my brother’s life, and with it, the family we once were. This story is told from the small, confused world of a child who didn’t yet have words for trauma — only the shock of sirens, the weight of silence, and the sudden understanding that the people who protect you can be broken too. It’s a story about innocence interrupted, the way grief reshapes a home, and how a single night can echo for decade.
The Stories We Chose Not to Tell
I grew up believing silence was strength—especially in my Appalachian family, where the hardest stories were buried deep. For forty years in law, I told other people’s stories, never my own. But the ones I avoided were the ones that continued to shape me. In retirement, I finally turned toward the memories I had spent a lifetime outrunning. The Stories We Chose Not to Tell is my attempt to give voice to the truths that whisper in the quiet—because what we hide doesn’t disappear. It waits.
The Upper Room
Above the garage in our former St. Paul, Minnesota home, or my small office overlooking a grove of trees in our present home in Hopkins, Minnesota is where my past insists on being heard. Each is an Upper Room where memories gather and sort. It’s where I write — surrounded by books, the noise of football games drifting up from below, and the quiet ghosts of memory pressing in around me. The Upper Room is less a physical space and more a threshold between who I was and who I am still becoming. Here, the everyday hum of life competes with the stories I once tried to forget — and more often than not, memory wins. This is where so many of my truths finally find their way onto the page.
Surviving and Thriving
For years, I believed survival was the end of the story—just making it through, keeping upright, breathing again. But true life begins after survival. Growing up in the wake of my brother’s death, my family barely endured, and I learned to build walls around my pain. Writing, therapy, and reflection taught me to live fully again, giving my ghosts names and my past form. Thriving doesn’t erase trauma—it lets you hold it differently. Survival was instinct. Thriving became choice, and every story I now tell is an act of both.
When Memory Lies
Memory is fragile, personal, and often contradictory. My wife remembers events differently than I do, and for years, I thought one of us had to be right. Writing memoir taught me that memory isn’t a photograph—it’s a painting, with each retelling adding new brushstrokes. The same childhood events can leave different impressions on those who lived them. Trauma fractures perception, and what feels like a misremembering is often a form of mercy. I write my version of events as I remember them, the truth as I have come to know it, and in doing so I can finally find a deep breath.
What I Learned from Kierkegaard and Mauriac
As I contemplated retirement from the practice of law, I pursued a Master’s in English with a thesis on Kierkegaard and Mauriac. I began by revisiting my college study of the philosophical and theological works of Kierkegaard. I paid my way through college by working as a copy editor of the Kierkegaard Writing Series, the English translation of his authorship.
Kierkegaard taught me that despair can mark the beginning of truth, while Mauriac showed grace hiding in guilt. These lessons followed me into my writing, shaping stories about faith, doubt, survival, and surrender. Law trained me to argue clearly; literature taught me to live with uncertainty. Memoir, I’ve learned, is about understanding life backwards so we can live it forwards.