A Passion for Clear, Powerful Writing

Professional Background

Joseph Campbell, scholar and mythologist, often said, “Follow your bliss.” I found my life’s bliss on my high school’s stage. Putting on a character’s mask let this introvert express a wide range of emotions I hid from the world. It was also something at which I was naturally good. My life’s journey, which that bliss inspired, took me places I never dreamed of going and to other unexpected blisses.

While pursuing acting, I earned a bachelor’s degree, but found a new passion—teaching. To pursue that bliss, I earned a master’s degree, figuring that would be the end of my formal education, but found a new bliss: scholarship. To my high school actor’s surprise, I earned a doctorate.

Impressed by my dissertation’s scholarship and writing, the department faculty invited me to join them after graduation and charged me with shepherding graduate students through the thesis and dissertation writing process. Thus began my career as a professor, writer, and editor.

Through three decades I taught a variety of subjects including creative writing, wrote film reviews, and edited a monthly business newsletter. After I retired, the desire to help others that drove me to teach found an outlet in collaborating with writers who wanted to refine and improve their non-fiction essays, papers, dissertations, and books.

Personal Background

When I was three, my parents moved us to Schenectady, New York where Dad took a job with General Electric. Mom and Dad bought a nice, very 1950s, split-level house on Dean Street. We spent idyllic summer weekends boating on Lake George and freezing winter days shoveling snow out of the driveway until I enrolled at Ithaca College.

After graduating from Ithaca, I enrolled at UConn where I earned a master’s degree before trying my hand in the Big Apple. One winter day, I stepped off a curb into what I thought was a shallow puddle. The freezing water poured over the top of my boot, and I knew that the northeast wasn’t for me.

Relatives living in Dallas invited me to Texas while I figured out my next move. On an 80-degree Valentine’s Day I sat by their pool and wondered why I wanted to go back north. I’ve been a Texan almost exclusively since then.

A Ph.D. from Texas Tech in Lubbock started my career as a professor. Though I taught elsewhere, when I retired, I moved back to Lubbock with my wife and our youngest son. When not editing, I enjoy reading sci-fi and fantasy, taking my family to the movies, going to the theatre, playing with our dogs and, when I have time, working on my great American novel.