After 40 years as a Commercial Real Property and Corporate Lawyer, I have retired to my first love, writing and telling short stories.
Literature was never far from my mind as I practiced law.
I completed a Masters in English in 2007, my thesis written on the remarkable similarities between the work of the Dane Soren Kierkegaard and the French novelist Francois Mauriac.
In 2022, I finished a second Masters, this time in Creative Writing and Publishing, with the Masters Project being the opening chapters of a 'real-ish' non-fiction memoir, built on individual short stories.
My focus is on the serial short story, principally a memoir-ish collection of non-fiction short stories titled "The Stories We Chose Not to Tell". And now I'm telling them.
My wife says of those stories where she thinks she remembers being a part, "I don't remember those events that way, at all." One professor, I believe as a compliment, says "I feel like I'm sitting in a bar listening to an engaging stranger tell the story of his life, and not quite believing it's all true."
The first part of the collection reveals how I went about surviving childhood trauma and the effects of complex post traumatic stress syndrome. The second part, the attempts at thriving.
An example of my published work "The Sleepover that changed Everything" appears in the Summit Avenue Review. The story tells of the night my brother was killed by a drunk driver, from my 7 year old recollection. My parents and my childhood were never the same.
My writing room in St. Paul, Minnesota is a far cry from my Appalachian roots in northern Kentucky, southern Illinois and Indiana. I try to write in my upper room above the garage of our family home, where college football and the golf channel compete with the attention my memories deserve, when I am not in the north woods or Naples, Florida, hanging out with my wife, a college professor, or our four children and four grandchildren.
After 40 years as a Commercial Real Property and Corporate Lawyer, I have retired to my first love, writing and telling short stories.
