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Keats called the world “the vale of Soul-making”: a place where suffering and hardship, if we survive them, form a soul. My life illustrates it.

By the early seventies I had graduated from college and, in effect, changed economic class, the first in my entire clan to do so. Before college I was profoundly alienated: a blackout alcoholic, a petty thief, self-destructive on the surface and sexually abused underneath. College opened doors. It did not change my soul. That took ten more years and two suicide attempts before I believed I was worthy of life.

Honest, intelligent friends gave me good experiences, and therapy gave me understanding. For years I trudged through the vale.

By 1983 I was ready for real life. I became executive director of Nuva and found the woman who would become my wife. I discovered my leadership qualities, and for twelve years I grew services for people in need.

In 1995 I left social services. I wanted to reach more people than I could by running Nuva. By then I believed passionately in the liberating power of art, and that it was a serious duty to give examples of freedom and character in it.

I had to learn how to write.

For twenty-eight years I struggled to express myself in words. In 2023 I published If Pain Could Make Music, and I confronted and exorcised the demon that had held me back all that time: the shame of my sexual abuse.

It is not easy to get through the vale of Soul-making, but it’s possible. That possibility is why I write.

Today my books exist in the world, read by others, while I sit safely at home with Lisa, listening to Ravel. That is so far from where I started. I am living in my dream. I have one goal before I die: to share my vale of Soul-making with as many people as I can.

My novels are about damaged souls who look deeply inside themselves to undo the damage. I call them fictional self-help because they show that a way out exists without pretending to hand anyone a map. I believe heroism in modern life is found in everyday struggle, in the courage to navigate the chaos and alienation of a fast-paced, post-industrial world. My heroes meet alienation, the feeling of being cut off from other people and from any meaning in one’s life, with resilience and creativity.

My characters have been traumatized into their alienation. I believe economic inequality breeds trauma, though my own life complicates that: I changed class, and the shame came with me.