Born in 1945 in Washington, DC and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Story telling began at 10 years old, delightfully terrifying siblings and friends with ghost stories, late at night after the grownups had gone to bed.

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My first inspiration to write was from Edgar Allen Poe. His literature was the only part of my high school education that got through and involved me. So, I wrote a Poe style short story, nothing memorable, but it primed the pump.

 

But before that the art seed was planted by my paternal grandmother who was a painter. She didn’t push it on me but her presence fertilized a young mind. And I proceeded on that path.

 

After high school I spent two years in Japan in the U. S. Marines, posted as an illustrator for a military PR magazine. While there I studied Sumi-e, the traditional painting technique using the oriental brush. And this included learning the oriental calligraphy where I discovered that their 46-character phonetic alphabet when recited was a philosophic poem about life. This and many other details of this rich beautiful culture left a life-long imprint on me and shaped my career as an artist. And it also showed me by comparison that I had been raised in a modern barbarism.

 

Years later I had the opportunity to revisit Japan through the pages of a book, Shogun by James Clavell. This exquisite piece of literature rocked my boat, more like capsized it. It was a profound experience to which I was indebted. And the only obvious payback was to become a writer.

 

As a starving artist in New York City my humble abode at the time was a bedroll on the floor of the closet of an off-Broadway playwright. One day he asked me to proof read a screenplay he was working on. Screenplay? . . . lights began to flicker . . . oh my, . . . Story ideas began to stack up in my pending bin.

I then met an aspiring film producer who read one of my film treatments and gave me a respectable advance to write the script. Computers were still in DOS mode, no script software, but I was off and running. Forty pages into the script something happened that shook the world, the Iron Curtain fell, it was 1989. The Iron Curtain happened to be a key element in the script’s story and it suddenly disappeared over night, the story was no longer relevant. Basically I had had the rug pulled out from under me. Fortunately the producer was still smiling and kindly forgave his deposit.

 

My appropriate response was “To hell with writing - next lifetime!”. And I jumped back into my art career. But my literary interests were still very much alive and story ideas were always brewing on the back burners.

 

My art career flourished, gallery shows, exhibit awards, good press and reviews, a dozen collectors with my work.

 

Then I did a bold move - I did a Scientology program that cleared out the cobwebs and fanned my creative embers. And the ember that burst into flames was the screenplay urge that I had nicely retired 30 years earlier.

 

But now we had modern computers and script writing programs. I was off and running again. I studied the essential books: McKee, Fields, McCullough and Aristotle’s Poetics and did Aaron Sorkin’s Master Class. And now my first script Forever Song is taking competition awards - history in the making.