Please take a moment

to meet the author of the “Ballot Boy” trilogy and a new mystery, “Like Bright Metal On A Sullen Ground.”

I was born at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, now home to the Church of Scientology.

I graduated from John Burroughs Jr. High School, Fairfax High School, and UC Berkeley. I learned history, Latin, literature, but of all my studies, typing has served me best. I was a crackerjack typographer back when there was such a thing and it was the most satisfying job I ever had.

My Curriculum Vita ranges from The Exploding Plastic Inevitable with Warhol and the Velvet Underground + Nico (New York, '65-66, Los Angeles-San Francisco '66, Provincetown, '66), to watching the internet eat newspapers for lunch from a front row seat in the corporate suite, to managing a bed and breakfast in Venice (Italy).

The Ballot Boy trilogy was born during my Venice years, taking a deep dive into the experience of growing up gay in the high middle ages when the punishment for being queer was burning at the stake.

I currently live in the blue bubble of St. Paul, state capitol of mostly blue Minnesota, in a neighborhood filled with rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter lawn signs (still), along with Steve, my partner of thirty years, Phyllis, my ex-wife of many more, my son Luke nearby, and Buddy and Mona, miniature dachshunds of major stature.

I am compelled to say that I thought I had seen the worst until Trump came along to lower the bar, dead-set on repeating an unthinkable past. I am often asked by younger folks what I miss most about the sixties and seventies (the music, the drugs, the mayhem) and my answer is always the same: optimism.

I know how it felt to be hopeful and deeply believe I could help change history. Optimism was my operating principle. It fueled me as a union organizer and communist, just as it mocked me during my hellish years in the executive suite of a moribund newspaper empire. My heart breaks for those who came after me, who never felt empowered to 'put [their] bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and make it stop,' as Mario Savio so famously exhorted on December 2, 1964, when we sat-in at Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. It feels like we lost, but I take some consolation in having known the feeling. I mourn it like a great lover who died too soon. I endure to help revive it again, even if only in my work. "¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!

I want my books to deliver a message to someone I will never know who lives in unendurable despair, desperately in need of hope.

Writing is the sole arena where I have agency and can control the narrative. My books grapple with the dire human condition, past and present, in search of a ground of hope, without which, we are pathetic, doomed creatures.

Then, when all is said in done, I retreat into the indomitable beauty and fecundity of nature, a self-perpetuating fount of hope and gratitude.