Bio

I was born in Minneapolis and raised on a Minnesota dairy farm. After serving four years in the US Navy and obtaining a BA degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, I worked as a newspaper reporter and editor in Chicago and Detroit and published fiction and nonfiction in literary and men’s magazines before emigrating with my wife to Canada in 1971. We settled in the Nelson, BC, area and since 1973 have lived on nine acres of land and in a house we (mostly) built ourselves near Balfour. From 1972 until its closure in 1977, I worked as assistant registrar of Notre Dame University of Nelson, afterwards in the library of the David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, until its closure in 1984, and finally in student services for Selkirk College, in Nelson, until my retirement in 1998. I began writing while in the Navy and won a Longview Foundation Award ($300) in 1959 for a story that had appeared the year before in a literary magazine. Later, in Canada, I wrote book reviews for the Calgary Herald and Baltimore’s now-defunct Charles Street Paper, and movie reviews for the former online Nelson Observer. In 1990 I won first prize in the personal essay division of the CBC Literary Competition for what became, in a revised form, the opening chapter of Leaving the Farm: Memories of Another Life (Oolichan Books, 2007), an account of my Minnesota boyhood. Most recently I was shortlisted for the 2011 Journey Prize for a story that originally appeared in the now-defunct New Orphic Review. For Selkirks Spectacular (Keokee Books, 2014) , a book of photographs and text celebrating the international Selkirk Loop drive through the mountains of southeast British Columbia, eastern Washington and the Idaho Panhandle, I wrote the text. As well, I’ve written a novel about back-to-the-land hippies in British Columbia at the end of the Sixties for which I’m seeking a publisher.