When people learn I’m a writer, they ask: “What do you write about?”

My answer: I write stories about characters who live at the crossroads of normalcy, and who may not recognize the signposts because I may have been one of them.

As a teenager in the Philadelphia area, I honed skills as a juvenile delinquent that had me on the path to a criminal career. Fortunately, a high school English teacher sat me down for several long conversations.

After miraculously gaining entrance and graduating from Penn State, I sold three short stories to mid-level publications before bouncing through a long career in the sales and marketing of surgical devices.

Today, I still wonder about the influences that kindled my choices and behavior so many years ago.

How was it that society’s rules of law and morality seemed like they really didn’t apply?

I had crossed a fine line but somehow made it back. Why hadn’t some of my friends, who either ended up in prison, suffered through substance abuse, or lingered on the cusp of mental illness?

The heart of these questions shapes the core of my writing.

While my stories incorporate crime, mystery, and villains with a dissolving sense of reality, my characters grow from my roots. A heritage anchored in the anthracite coal region of northeast Pennsylvania and stretches into blue-collar Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Thanks for reading!