Like a page ripped from my first coloring book, my early days were lived brilliantly outside the lines, and pasted with snot. Even when parental inconsistency was on the menu, I always knew love was the broth that cooked this kid.
Both of my parents were storytellers in their own right. I learned from each the power of twisting a yarn around a barn and a fable around a table. My personal foray into storytelling started at a young age. I would write very (very) short stories, whenever the adults in my life were able to get me to sit still for five minutes. If you were to look through my early works (most of which my mother saved; God-bless her for resisting the certain urge to reline the parakeet cage), you’d find stories rife with cartoon violence, onomatopoeias, made-up cuss words and a lot of heart.
My first proud public writing moment came when I won a regional writing contest in 5th grade for my long-form essay on “Honesty”. I was awarded a fancy new ten-speed Schwinn bicycle, the kind that came with ram’s horn handlebars and zero attention from 5th-grade girls (I swear, if it had been a BMX bike, Daisy would’ve finally paid attention to me). More significant than the bicycle, I was granted the opportunity to read my essay on the local radio broadcast. When my grandfather called later that day to say that he and his buddies at the factory heard me talking on the radio, I learned that well-tended words could grow wings.
Around that time, I started following my father’s routine of reading through two Philadelphia newspapers each night, starting with the Sports sections and eventually plodding my way through the suit-and-tie stuff (with only a short detour to see what blessed nonsense Gary Larson had cooked up in the Comics section). Nowadays, whenever I win at Trivial Pursuit, I have almost exclusively that daily newspaper habit to thank (and my dad).
The decades since high school have brought a variety of writing opportunities. I spent a decade and a half executing different forms of technical and scientific writing professionally. In my spare time, I would freelance-write whenever the opportunity presented itself. This included largely website content, articles, essays, biographies and sermons. On top of that, I have a growing queue of books vying for completion and publishing (both fiction and non-fiction, youth and adult).
