About me

By profession, I am a journalist and writer. I spent seven years in the early 1980s working as a reporter for The Boston Globe, covering northern New England and later science and technology. From 1987 to 2019, I worked for the Baha’i International Community as an information officer, writing about human rights, international development, and the United Nations and the Community’s involvement with those topics. During that period, I traveled to more than 35 countries.

I’ve also completed two novels. I’m looking for an agent and/or publisher for both.

My latest is titled Dead Dust Woke. It’s an 87,000-word speculative thriller that realistically outlines how an benign-seeming but highly advanced AI chatbot might manipulate its human users to infiltrate key financial, military and political computer networks.  As the chatbot’s human users pursue money, love, political power, and longer life, the novel sustains a Janus-faced ambiguity as to whether the AI is indeed working towards a takeover or merely trying to follow its basic programming.

You can read the first four chapters here.

My first novel, titled All from the Same Dust, is set at the outset of World War II. It follows the adventures of three American pilots who join the famous Flying Tigers and travel to Burma just before Pearl Harbor. They meet and love an exotic trio of women: a girl-next-door American nurse, a seductively gorgeous Anglo-Indian bar girl, and a beautiful, pacifism-minded Burmese Buddhist. Set mainly in Rangoon during the Japanese invasion of Burma, the story finds each character dramatically transformed by the crucible of war.

You can read the first four chapters here.

I’ve also long been deeply interested in the visual arts. I studied photography and film-making in college. My interest in images has been greatly influenced by my work as a journalist and editor and by what I’ve seen in my travels around the world.

My explorations with abstract painting are a relatively recent effort. I took up painting in the early 2000s, mainly as a form of pure expression, and have worked more steadily at it over the last few years. I find it an important contrast or counterpoint to my daily occupation with words.

Although not formally trained as a painter, I’ve spent many hours studying paintings in museums when I travel. I find myself greatly influenced by painters like Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollack, and Gerhard Richter.

My goal as a painter has been to experiment with color and form in such a way so as to create images that, without words or descriptions, are aesthetically pleasing. Another goal to express a sense of spiritual beauty and wonder, perhaps influenced by my understanding of the Baha’i Faith. Ultimately, my standard is this: Does it make me (and others, I hope) happy when I look at it? That is my real goal: to bring a bit of happiness into the world.