Biography
Stories are pieces of the world that come up out of the night like flares on a darkened road, burning bright, warning us of something up ahead. An accident? Something broken down? Fear and laughter?
This is how I have thought of my life, starting in the cold of a frozen Minnesota winter, marching up through the seasons of snow and heat, of snow covering everything and then melting away to reveal the flat prairie expanses, the heat coming up and slowing down life itself.
The world looked this way to me as first a child, and then a boy growing up in this Midwestern place among the stories that my parents and Aunts and Uncles told me. Seeing the anger erupt out of my mother like pain, like fire, until I had to hide, to run to my father and brother and away to the fields and lakes, to fish and hunt and kill things that I never wanted to hurt. None of it fit, none of it made sense.
I turned to reading, reading comic books, Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk, the Thing, the Fantastic four. There were no books in our house, no one really read anything, and so I turned to these comics. Every weekend I would go to the pharmacy where they had racks of them for 15 or 25 cents apiece, and I would ask my Father to buy me ten or fifteen or even twenty of them. So many that he would grimace a bit at the cost.
I got lost in these little books, reading them over and over into the night, with my flashlight on in my bedroom under my warm blankets. And the stories in these comic books turned in my imagination into fantasies, and the fantasies became stories and I lived in these fantasies as I spun in my mind stories in which I was the Hero, the one conquering the bad in the world.
The bad! As I grew older, my fantasies turned to the good and the bad and the grey area that lay between right and wrong. And I began to write. As I went through my classes in school, I wrote stories. I escaped into my imagination, twisting and turning and falling down into it faster and faster until the surface of my life faded away and I could no longer see, no longer wanted to see, way up into the reality of my surroundings.
I finished High School, and I turned to work. Working in all kinds of places, gas stations and cleaning buildings and then the Railroad, working outdoors in the freezing cold winters and hot summers of Minnesota. Until the work became too much, and I decided to travel through the country.
I hitch-hiked to New York, and down to Florida and then across the South all of the way through Texas and into California and up the West Coast. When I returned home I started college. And it was great. I loved it. I loved the study and the learning and all of it. I finished my undergraduate work, and then I decided to apply to Medical School. I saw it as a challenge back then, as something to take on, to see if I could do it.
And all of the time writing, thinking of stories, trying to capture the pieces of my life in words and paragraphs. Writing in the mornings, in the evenings, writing. It gave me a direction, it made sense in my life, it pulled things together. But it was hard to keep writing with all of the demands of Medical School and Residency Training. So the writing fell away for a while.
And now I have come back to it. I have published two books in my profession of Psychiatry. I have published several short stories. And this has become my passion, the chance to create my own worlds through my stories.
This is where I am, sitting on my bed in our home, writing all of this on my computer as I reach over to touch my wife. My lovely wife Bridgitte. I feel her soft skin, I look into her face, I hear our children down below talking and giggling and the laughter drifts up to us and my wife smiles. I have found a direction.
