My Journey

I am an author and an artist. My skills have developed from reading books, observing life, having a family and dreaming my wild dreams. I spend my time learning through trial and error, and trial and success, working hard to capture the essence of the worlds that present themselves to me in my moments of inspiration. 

Since childhood I’ve had vivid dreams and visions that I've rendered as graphic works of art. Now writing is the medium I'm choosing to embody these explorations of the psyche.

I grew up in the small town of Deep River Connecticut with four brothers and three sisters. I owe a great deal to my family for their support, critiques and strangely enough even to their doubts, as I’ve embarked on my writing career.

Many of my fictional characters have personalities drawn from my quite large and extended family, some of them just in name, others as conglomerations of personal traits that I used to build a character. 

In 2014, after spending forty of my adult years in Pennsylvania and Northern California, I moved back to the Connecticut River Valley.

Novel writing is new to me. I wrote a lot of poetry in high school and journaled throughout my life, typically picking up my artwork log and writing about my life every time I went in the studio to paint. I've written a few short stories in the past and have had work published in a local journals in California. Though it's been the norm for me to wake up after a dream and sketch a scene which I could then turn into a painting, I hadn't done that with writing until now.

On November 15, 2017, I awoke from an intense and intriguing dream where I was in a strange world. I was carried from a field of ferns to a home with an arched window through which I could see another house perched on the edge of an adjacent bluff, with water pouring out of large rounded rectangular opening on its face, like a gaping mouth. Waves were crashing up, around and through the rocks spewing water seemingly a hundred feet into the air, like powerful geysers erupting from the surface of the sea.

I arose and drew the image, but then decided to write about the experience, and the story simply kept writing itself, flowing out of me in a way I didn’t know was possible. After two weeks, and at least three more dreams involving the main characters, I had more than 17,000 words written. I didn't know at the time that the piece was going to turn into a novel.

So here I am, traveling on a new path that's leading me on the most exciting creative experience of my life.