ON WRITING: 

Once, I was a poet. Then I started writing essays on teaching and learning. Overseas, I slow-drifted into international reporting and spent about a decade writing and editing international longform essays on everything from octopus-hunting to port politics, divorce laws to refugee housing rights in Denmark. Now I live in a world of creative nonfiction, where all my passions come alive in a single pursuit: to tell a great story that connects and inspires.

Rooted in traditions of confession and autobiography, I love to play with words, reveling in the neo-logistic madness of constructing a self-in-progress. I have always followed the Transcendentalists' lead, to get out of one's own way when I write: divining & devising, reaching toward and pulling out images that together reveal new meanings and demands. 

My personal writing often explores time and place, the seen and the unseen, identity and self, along with all the contradictions, failures, losses, and impossibilities therein. I am currently working on a book of essays about faith and belonging in Zanzibar. 

"Everything is fleeing toward its presence." — Robero Juarroz

"All language is predicated on loss." — Ted Aoki