I’ve reluctantly chosen to be listed under the “Poet” category, although my work dips its toes into both “fiction” and “creative nonfiction,” as well as a variety of textual formats – verse, documentary poetry, prose, closet-drama, and some hybrid genres of my own invention. This has led one journalist to coin the term "mixed-genre novel" for my books, which is as good a description of my "genre" as any. But of the three choices available here, “poetry” seems the most inclusive, since it has traditionally allowed the greatest latitude for the interplay of fact, fiction, and memory. In fact, that interplay itself is one of my central artistic concerns.
My first book, Home Truths (2006; revised/expanded edition 2018) is a speculative reconstruction of events that occurred in my family before I was born. While working on the individual pieces in this volume, I became fascinated by the possibilities of the sequence or collection itself as a literary medium. It seemed to me that a series of independent but linked “snapshots” of lyric and narrative moments, employing different perspectives, techniques, even genres, could perhaps get closer to the texture of lived experience than either the focussed narrative of a novel or the inevitable discreteness of the miscellaneous volume of poetry. Such a linked sequence can reflect the ways in which any human life intersects with other lives, stories and points of view, while at the same time privileging one of those lives or stories as the ultimate center of attention. Primary influences on Home Truths are Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, and Marilyn Nelson’s The Homeplace.
In my second book, Body and Soul (2015), the separateness of individual pieces – heightened by shifts in format and point of view – allowed me to portray the many contradictions and disruptions in the life of my main character, an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse suffering from gaps and distortions of memory as well as intermittent episodes of dissociative identity disorder, involving the formation of several distinct “alter” personalities. Simultaneously, the relationships between individual pieces, as well as their more-or-less chronological arrangement in the book, serve to narrate her efforts to reintegrate the alters and construct a functional, coherent adult personality. The extraordinary complexity of this character and her story took the better part of twelve years to research and write. In developing the repertoire of techniques necessary for writing Body and Soul as I conceived it, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller provided examples and points of departure; I also took some cues from the updated closet-drama technique employed by Truman Capote in his book Music for Chameleons.
My current work in progress, another “mixed-genre novel” with the working title Livings, focusses on a specific period (1845-1850) in the lives of the famous Brontë family, with an emphasis on their interactions as a family unit: four highly gifted, eccentric adult siblings and their equally unusual father, living under the same roof in an isolated industrial village in northern England. How do these five personalities, intimately sharing an extremely limited fund of incident and event, create such widely divergent inner lives for themselves? What causes them to react so differently to the basic human experiences of unrequited love, religious feeling, grief, and mortality? What do they reveal to (and conceal from) each other, within the close confines of a shared home, and how are they seen by the villagers surrounding them? This material seems well-suited to my preoccupation with intersecting narratives and interpretations, and the methods I have developed for writing about them.
In 2022, I finally paid a long-standing debt to one of my foundational literary influences, Edgar Lee Masters, by publishing Down Into This Land, the first such selected edition since the poet's own in 1925, and therefore the first to represent his entire 50-year publishing career. For this book, I have chosen and edited 101 poems, provided extensive annotations, and an introductory overview of the major phases in the poet's work.
I hold an MA in English and Creative Writing from West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where I studied with poet Christopher Buckley; and a PhD in Creative Writing, Composition, and English Studies from the University of Cincinnati, where my mentoring writers were Don Bogen and Andrew Hudgins. I am recently (2022) retired from full-time college teaching, and enjoying the life of a full-time writer instead.
