About the Author

It was the fine wine business that got me started as a writer. How else to communicate the flavor of wine to others? We can record or transcribe music for future enjoyment years or even centuries hence; we can photograph our children at age five and film their various milestones for posterity, and we can encode chemical reactions for replication upon demand. But when it comes to memorializing and communicating how, say, the legendary 1945 Château Margaux has tasted at various stages of its development, all we have is language. I found this a wonderful realization, because I have long been a lover of words (logophile or lexophile?) and, according to my favorite English teacher ever, I'm blessed with “an ear for idiom.”

 

Two decades ago I began writing a monthly wine column for a regional lifestyle magazine (i.e., a high-end shopping flyer full of antique store ads.) I found that the frilly adjectives flowed easily as I described this wine or that… especially after refilling my goblet for second and third opinions. My love of writing steadily grew as I honed my craft, and with some self-directed study I branched into other topics and genres. I am now sitting on an unsold screenplay that was a runner-up in a Hollywood contest, an unpublished novel that weighs about three pounds, and a self-published memoir of my battle with cancer that coincided with my courtship/marriage/honeymoon with Andrea, the subject of my fondest high school longings.

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Because writers differ from pizzas in that the latter can actually feed a family of four, I have always relied on menial albeit decent-paying jobs for survival, and I presently toil as a truck driver. But I refuse to let gainful employment dissuade me from writing because the words and ideas keep flowing. I still have stories to tell, advice to offer, and things to say.