NARRATIVE BIO

I grew up in what could be called an atmosphere of well-intentioned dysfunction.  The product of a summer fling, I was raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. by my Greek grandparents, dominated by my volatile grandmother.  Later, I lived with my mother and the man she married when I was four years old, who would eventually adopt me.  He was an aspiring lounge singer and a writer and it is he who would instill in me a love of music, language and stories. He and his buddies were quick-witted and funny.  Unfortunately, they were also alcoholics. 

Life was fun, but not terribly stable.  I recall several mornings getting ready for school and stepping over the bodies passed out on the living room floor from the party the night before.
This instability manifested itself in me as a certain lack of focus.  My professional life was not exactly linear in its trajectory. 

Take a look at the jobs I've held (ranging in duration from 5 years to several hours) since graduating from college in 1980 with a degree in political science:  receptionist, director of government affairs, drummer, band leader, director of membership services, talent agent, tuxedo-clad rose delivery guy, executive director of a national non-profit, drum instructor, free-weekly newspaper delivery guy, marketing consultant, musical instrument catalog sales rep, director of meetings and conventions, co-owner of a chain of stores selling only items approved by the federal women-infant-children program (WIC), sales consultant in a home furnishings store, personal trainer, retail sales rep in a gay men's clothing boutique, house painter, bartender, and co-owner of a dog daycare center.

Think you're having a bad day?  Imagine this:  you are a rookie career consultant and I am your next client.
 
Compiling this list, much less living it, was exhausting.  Looking back, the only constant running through all those meandering, careening years was my misery.  The "good" jobs made me feel trapped and a fraud, the others, demeaned and a loser.

Nor was my personal life a model of conventionality.  True, I did have a ten-year marriage with a beautiful, talented, brilliant woman.  We made money, bought a beautiful house in Washington, D.C. and a cottage in Cape Cod—which all sounds good until I throw in the part about my wife being a gay man trapped in a woman's body, about immersing ourselves in the circuit party scene, traveling the country and the world with our gay friends getting high and being fabulous—that is, until we crashed.  Hard.  There was depression, divorce and (for me) relocation.

You should write a book, you say? After moving from Washington, D.C. to Miami, that's exactly what I began to do—a memoir about the influence of the women in my life, culminating with me, a hetero guy, living an essentially gay lifestyle.

It was then, and only then, that my life began to reassemble itself into something approaching sense. 

I enrolled in a series of workshops and began to learn the craft of writing.  I took a job at the Florida Center for the Literary Arts that put me in the company of authors, editors, and agents and for which I began to teach continuing-education creative writing classes.

I finished a draft of my manuscript and found an accomplished editor to coach me.  I was selected to read from my work at notable public venues, including the Miami Book Fair (one of the largest literary events in the country) and Lip Service (a wildly-popular Miami reading event), to good response.  I coordinated a showcase for local writers and musicians, called Write Out Loud. To my relief, I was good at what I was doing and, to my astonishment, I liked it.

As my manuscript, now entitled TWISTED STRAIGHT, began to come together, I had stories published in the literary journals:  Sliver of Stone, R-KV-RY Quarterly and book reviews in The Florida Book Review.

Based on excerpts I submitted from TWISTED STRAIGHT, I was granted residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild.

For the first time in my life, I was on a path to something—to anything.  Now, I needed to get better at writing, to progress from what I considered the status of a talented amateur to a professional. 

At the urging of a colleague and friend, I applied to the same MFA program she had attended, Florida International University, a small but highly-regarded program whose faculty includes Les Standiford, Dan Wakefield, John Dufresne, Campbell McGrath, Lynne Barrett and others. I applied, was admitted and granted a teaching fellowship.  

Excerpts from my manuscript won the University-wide first-place literary award for nonfiction two years in a row.

At a local writer's conference, I met literary agent Joelle Delbourgo, who read a sample of my work and who now represents me.

So, that's my story, at least so far.  I suppose it's not unusual to take some time off between college and grad school.   Time to relax a little, think a little--live a little--before plunging back into the routine of school. Some people take a few months and backpack through Europe or drive across the country.  For me, it turned out to be 28 years.  The point is, I suppose, that I got here.

What’s next?  That’s difficult to say.  Richard Pryor once told a story about a big, rangy ghetto dog which comes upon an object on the sidewalk it can't identify.  Perplexed, he circles it several times, sniffs, but to no avail.  "I don't know what it is," thinks the dog, "but I'm gonna' fuck it."  So, here I am, on the verge of something. I don't quite know what it is either, but I'm going to write about it.