Overview

Life in Writing

Papaw the master storyteller: hilarious and terrifying tales experienced, invented and collected tramping through the dark Appalachian mountains...

Dense hardwood forest along a stream, an ecosystem full of mysterious characters and transformations...

Creating illustrated stories featuring imaginary and real animals...

First readings: the Greek myths, tales of Reynard the Fox...

In school, publishing humorous stories and plays, mystical poems...

"The hollotite began life 9,000,000 years ago. This animal was one inch long and ate tiny microscopic animals. It was hollow and only the worm-like rings on its skin held it together. It had a cape on its head that I cannot understand. After this the animal lived 7,000 years until it died out. I have found a lot of marked rocks in my life and I enjoy the hobby. The rocks tell many good stories."

College & grad school: churning out naturalistic short stories, submitting one after the other...

Finally winning a Chicago literary award for a Faulkneresque short story...

California: science fiction stories in student publications

Tramping around southern Mexico and Guatemala, hoboing around the U.S., writing a colorful journal to be edited and published someday soon!

Completing a (short) novel, filing it away with a sigh of relief...

San Francisco: underground arts explosion, founding the Terra Incognita loft

Milieu of madness, trauma, dark nights of the body and soul amid tenements abandoned by society...

Deadly boring day job, much of the day writing delirious poetry and song lyrics, a flood that only ends when the scene itself dies down...

Art and music projects kick into gear, a vibrant community starts to build around the Terra Incognita loft, and on frequent camping trips, the desert begins to take hold of his imagination...

Life becomes richer, adventures accumulate: not the least of which is the eventual destruction of the loft by the Loma Prieta earthquake...

Discovering the pamphlet literature of Onitsha, Nigeria, one of the great literary paradigms of world history...

Hard times followed by ever more fearless exploration...

At the epicenter of the dotcom boom in San Francisco and Los Angeles, he picks up more stories on the frontline of that orgy of greed...

No longer able to keep the stories inside, he self-publishes some of them in pamphlet form, inspired by the Onitsha marketplace, distributing them free to his friends - his best writing so far...

After retiring from tech industry work, finally tackling the book-length manuscripts he's been planning for decades, starting with the epic saga of his San Francisco artists' loft...