I grew up in the Midwest, where the land is flat, the corn is tall, and winter feels like a dare. It was bleak and cold. I hated winters.

I always wanted to write. But writing is hard, and discipline was not my strength. (The cold didn’t help.) That changed in grad school.

After too many failed proposal drafts, my major professor started losing money on red ink. His advice: figure it out. Somehow, I did.

When grad school ended, my wife and I packed up our two very small kids and moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Winters there feel like spring. Summers? A sauna. Cliché, yes. Accurate, also yes.

I began teaching horticulture and writing for trade magazines. I eventually published two textbooks in landscape design and a gardening column for the Post and Courier. They were great gigs. But none of them were fiction.

That part came later.

Our daughter “read” before she could read—pretending she knew the words in books she propped on her lap. Our son was different. In a desperate attempt to get him interested in reading, I decided we’d write a story together. We invented a character, gave him a quest, and… like much of parenting, the plan went sideways. But the character stayed with me.

He wanted out.

A few years later, Socket Greeny was born. A gritty, thoughtful sci-fi trilogy released in 2005.

I’ve practiced Zen meditation daily since I was twenty-three. That practice found its way into my writing—quietly, but with intention—because I wanted my stories to offer something meaningful for both young adults and adults alike.

I hadn’t planned on writing fiction. I didn’t even know if I had more stories in me after Socket Greeny.

Turns out, I did.

Dig a little deeper… the early years bio

In 2017, I published a memoir that chronicled my wife and my experience as birth parents. The short story details my earlier life surrounding the event of an unexpected pregnancy and the twenty-five years that followed.