I was born in Burlington, North Carolina, a dusty little town situated in what we call the Piedmont, a place dead center between the picturesque Appalachian Mountains and the broad sandy shores of the Outer Banks. Except for a couple of years in Michigan and a few more in New York City I have lived in “The Old North State” my entire life.

My brother, mom, and me in Michigan.

After my entry into this world, my family moved to Michigan until my parents divorced two years later. Other than being cold all I can remember about Michigan was leaving it and being in a car for twelve hours on our way back to Burlington.

For the next five years, my brother and I lived with my grandparents while my mother went off to school to become a nurse anesthetist. Every weekend she’d drive three hours in a tin can ‘56 Chevy to spend the weekend with us and every Sunday evening I’d ring the front porch chimes as she headed out of the driveway on her way back to school. And every Sunday I would cry myself to sleep. To this day Sunday evenings are a bit melancholy as are the sounds of chimes. Below is a painting I did for a college art class. The assignment was to express sadness. That’s me, mom, and her car driving back to school. 

Other than that, my grandparent’s house was the center of a universe filled with love and happiness. On a small city block, on the outskirts of town, it sat next to my great grandparents. Next to them was an uncle and aunt who owned an adjacent tiny house that my uncle converted to a golf shop. Many a summer night I’d sit on the front porch watching him mending his clubs while he and his cronies spun their tales while passing a communal bottle of bourbon cloaked in a brown bag. It was there that I learned how to spit, instructed on how to drive a golf ball, and appreciate the subtleties of a good joke. It was also where I learned the art of storytelling. From tales of the second great war to the proverbial fish that got away I took in hundreds of hours of yarns unconsciously archiving every syllable for later use. With my elementary school on one corner and an old coffin factory across the street, complete with a foreman who owned a pet monkey named Happy, this was the world that ignited an imagination that has continued to grow until this day.

After my mom completed her schooling we packed up and moved a few hours west to Statesville, a cozy hamlet one could easily envision across a Norman Rockwell canvas. Although I was debilitatingly shy I managed to make several lifelong friends. There was plenty of camping, crawdad fishing, and squirrel hunting accompanied by a growing urge to write and draw. The newspaper clipping pictured here shows me holding a $25 gift for coming in second place in the state-wide writing contest. StarTrek fans have to appreciate those Vulcan sideburns.

As I progressed through middle school, I also began fancying myself a future advertising man. This print ad for Leonard’s Jewelry is from a seventh-grade advertising contest. Out of a crowded field of three, I took home first-place honors. Note the clever tag line… ‘Their list is long. But prices are short.’ Not quite Super Bowl ad copy but it was a start.

Unbeknown to anyone I was secretly writing almost daily. Short stories, poetry, even a couple of novellas. Sadly, they all met their demise at the hot end of a match as I began to pursue anything that could earn a badge on my letterman’s jacket. Football became my passion. So much so that when I graduated high school, I signed on with a small college thirty minutes down the road just to play ball. A broken nose, torn ACL, and one dislocated shoulder in the span of a year convinced me I was more cut out for flipping tiddlywinks than grinding it out on the gridiron. With no regrets, I left my jock years behind and headed for the sandy soil of East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. There I promptly traded in my letterman’s jacket for the starched button-down of a preppy fraternity boy.

A deviant lifestyle that ensued almost derailed my degree in graphic design and marketing until an ECU grad helped me land an advertising job in New York City with a now-defunct sci-fi magazine called Omni. At $16,000 a year, I was living large in the Big Apple. If you can call living in a one-room apartment at the YMCA, then by all accounts I was rock’n it. I quickly moved up the corporate ladder but with every pay raise, it seemed the more I longed for home.  After three years of battling bitter winters, horrid asphalt-induced summer sweat fests, and the rigors of making exact change every time I took the bus, I was ready to head back south.

This time I ended up in Raleigh, NC, where I spent the next three decades managing marketing for various companies including one I co-owned for ten years. Socially things were great. I ultimately met the woman of my dreams and started a family. And in 2013 I regained my writing mojo when I self-published Rapture’s Rain, a story about faith set against a dystopian backdrop. Several years later we chased our dreams up to the hills of Asheville, NC with the goal of finding our way out of the rat race down in the flatlands. Although I’m still providing marketing consultation, I’m deep into my next phase of writing which has produced the 96,000-word thriller, The Memory Stones. Beyond the sequel, which is in the works, don’t be surprised to see Happy the monkey make his debut shortly thereafter!