BIOGRAPHY I was born January 15, 1952 in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. We lived on a dead-end street, just three houses up the public school, which meant I could go home for lunch, then dawdle over a book or magazine until the very last minute and still make it back to class on time. The first book I remember is a coverless, tattered copy of Dick and Jane. I sat in the ditch in front of our house and taught myself to read. In grade eight I loved space travel, the Beatles, James Bond novels and anything by HG Wells and Jules Verne. In 1965 we moved to Don Mills, an upscale suburb in the north part of Toronto. I went to a private boys school for most of high school, shed my interest in rockets and science, and fell in love with modern fiction and poetry, the more tortured and anguished the better. I read Camus, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Joyce and Hemingway. I pretended I understood existentialism. I smoked dope and hash, dropped acid and mescalin, even injected speed. I taught myself to play classical guitar. I dreamed of running away from middle-class suburbia and never coming back. I traveled alone in Europe for eight months after finishing high school in the spring of 1970. I tried university twice (Mt. Allison, York University), and gave up each time. When I was 20, I worked as a house painter in Miami Beach for four months and drove myself crazy. See my story, Exile in Miami Beach. In the late 1970s, I worked as a newspaper reporter, first in Thompson, Manitoba, for Canada’s smallest daily newspaper, then for progressively larger papers in Barrie, Ontario, Otttawa and finally the Globe and Mail. In 1980, I traveled alone in Asia for eight months, visiting Hong Kong, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka. In the fall of 1982s, I met Judith Thompson at a pajama party in Toronto. I thought she was rich, she thought I was gay. We were both wrong. We’re still together. In the late 1980s I worked as a house painter and office temp. I wrote a play, Down for the Count, that ran for a week at a summer theatre near Toronto in 1987. In 1990, we moved to Vancouver, where I worked as computer trainer for law firms. I went back to school part-time in 1996 and finished my undergrad degree at SFU. I fell in love with sailing and bought a 25-foot sailboat in 1998 and sailed Howe Sound and the Strait of Georgia, single-handed, all year round, for five years. In the fall of 2001 I met Stephen Osborne in a SFU writing class and rediscovered creative writing. Stephen published two of the pieces I wrote for that class in his magazine, Geist. Both pieces are in the Non-fiction section of this web site: Ladder 25 describes a visit to New York City three weeks after Sept 11, and What Should We Talk About Now? is a story about my father. In the winter of 2002 I applied to the UBC masters program in creative writing. I discovered fiction (yes!) and wrote half a dozen short stories in a fine workshop run by novelist Keith Maillard. My thesis with Keith is a short, intense novel, Hold Me Now, about a man whose son is beaten to death in Stanley Park. I wrote the first draft of about 75,000 words in four months in the spring and summer of 2004, have done several rewrites since then, and am about to start sending out samples to agents and publishers. I’m also working on a nonfiction book proposal about relationships between older women and younger men. And I’m looking forward to the fall issue of Descant, one of Canada’s best known and most respected lit magazines, because it will contain my short story “A Question of Balance”, about a woman whose husband has succumbed to Alzheimer’s. May 27, 2005