BIOGRAPHY

I was nine years old when my writing life began. I’d written a two act play at summer camp about child actors whose parents wanted them to be actors when all they wanted was to be kids. The play was performed to a captive audience of parents, with me as director. I was going to be the next Orson Welles.

As an adult my first full time job was fledgling production assistant at CBS News. By then a news and foreign affairs junky, I thought I’d found my niche in broadcast journalism. I was going to be the next Barbara Walters.

When the State Department contacted me for a position in the Foreign Service, I thought I already knew who I was. But the temptation to use my writing and electronic news gathering skills in a foreign affairs job, while living abroad and learning foreign languages, was irresistible. Always a restless person, I left CBS and everything familiar to travel a path that changed my life.

My years as a Foreign Service officer crossed four continents, several military coups, political assassinations, devastating Third World poverty and an emotionally shattering Vietnam War. I often sought renewal of the soul in solitary places like Himalayan mountainsides, the Sahara Desert, the African bush.

In Washington, D.C. I wrote and produced educational documentaries on economic development and humanitarian assistance in Third World countries. I wrote press releases and prepared diplomats for radio and TV interviews. My gift of a lifetime came during a World Health Organization conference when an aging and feisty Dr. Margaret Mead granted me a one-on-one interview in her hotel room.

On assignment as a field producer for the Agency For International Development, I traveled by mule and horseback with my camera crew to document the refugee crisis in the mountains of Nicaragua and Honduras during the Contra rebel conflict.

Now a private citizen, I'm just as busy. Despite a lifetime of journalistic style writing and reporting, that nine-year-old novelist was dying to emerge. Set in my beloved Japan where I lived for several years, Silk Kimono/Mystic Sword is a mystical fictional allegory inside an accurately researched setting of historical fact.

I continue to write articles, blogs and editorial commentaries for the Internet on a variety of topics from fashion and travel to politics and health. My job as writer/editor is to make certain the writer's finished product reflects the originality and passion industry professionals look for.

As a person, I think the quote from Richard Russo’s Empire Falls best defines me. “Lives are like rivers. Eventually they go where they must, not where we want them to.”