“A monstrous aberration makes people believe that language was born to facilitate their mutual relations.”

                                                                                                             —attributed to both Andre Breton and Michael Leiris

Born in 1953, I was raised in Muskegon on the scenic shores of Lake Michigan and moved to Portland in 1977. Currently I am the poetry and book review editor for The Bear Deluxe Magazine, the Pacific Northwest’s finest environmental arts magazine. As a Portland poet, my work has been published in a wide range of zines, journals, and anthologies. I've also read my work at a myriad of venues including Artquake, the Portland Poetry Marathon, the Portland Poetry Festival, the Seattle Poetry Festival, Mountain Writers Series, as well as every open mic forum from the Long Goodbye, through the Riverway, Café Lena and the Blue Monk.

I have written about a wide range of subjects, from literature and medicine to computers and chess. From 1987 through 1992, I was a chess correspondent for The Oregonian and received five awards from the Chess Journalists of America. My work has appeared in the Rose Arts Magazine, the Rain City Review, the Oregon Scientist, and OGI’s Vision Magazine. Most recently an article first penned for The Bear Deluxe (#25, 2007) entitled “Apocalypse Now: Coltan, Cell Phones and Crisis in the Congo” was picked up by the popular on-line news-zine, Common Dreams.

Humans are hopelessly dependent on linguistic communication. We talk largely because hot air is emitted from our lungs then we write down those utterances as though there was a fecundity in the oral atmosphere. I can only imagine why other people write. I’m only a little more certain about why I write. I write to remember and document my own experience. I write to tell other people about what I think I know and to explore those vast parts of the world that I don’t know. I write to understand myself and as a means of interacting with this wonderful and cruel experience known as life.