I grew up in New England; was educated at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where I met my wife, Kate; began my working life as a 4th grade teacher at a small private school in Concord, Massachusetts; went into business at age 32, working as a salesman and national sales manager for a Fortune 500 forest products company, a paper broker, and, finally, an exporter of paper to Mexico. The big company moved me to its headquarters in Atlanta in 1988. There we raised our three sons, who now all live in the San Francisco Bay area, where they are a chemist, a union organizer, and a surfboard maker. In April 2018 Kate and I moved to our home on Port Royal Sound in Beaufort, South Carolina–the Low Country.
The most memorable years of my childhood were spent in a small semi-rural town fifty miles northwest of Boston–Lunenburg, Massachusetts. I grew to love nature and the out-of-doors there and at a summer camp in Wiscasset, Maine–Chewonki. Today I find joy in birding, kayaking, backpacking, and sailing.
My wife and I are active in our local Unitarian Universalist congregation, the UU Fellowship of Beaufort; the Friends of Hunting Island, a wonderful barrier island state park; and the Citizens Climate Lobby.
Fifteen years ago a mentor encouraged me to write. My early wriitng took the form of what author Nan Phifer calls “Memoir of the Soul” or spiritual autobiography. I revisited the events and relationships of my life for meaning, wrote about them, and shared them. I read Ralph Waldo Emerson; Alfred North Whitehead; Charles Hartshorne and other Process theologians; Richard Rohr and other modern thinkers, keen on understanding the concepts of the True Self and intuitive access to wisdom. I shared my learnings with my Unitarian Universalist congregation in Roswell, Georgia and other UU congregations in Georgia and South Carolina. And several years ago I took to fiction to explore the manifold ways in which we become fully human. Through the Grapevine is such an effort.
Read a sampling of Through the Grapevine.
