When people ask me how l’m doing, l often quip, “Not bad for an elderly gentleman in the twilight of a mediocre career.” Whatever my professional successes or failures have been, my career has been interesting. It has been varied and never boring. I’ve worked in a root beer stand, peddled magazines, paddled around as a lifeguard and pool manager, had a grand time laboring in an ice cream factory, pumped and lubed in a gas station, helped laryngectomees learn to speak on a burp, pontificated as a professor, served as a full-time clergyman, led four colleges and universities as their president, and searched high and low for qualified people as a higher education executive search consultant (English translation: headhunter).
Now in my twilight, I write stories. The foci are three: historical, romantic, and Christian. Nothing energizes me more than the painstaking research necessary to write an authentic historical novel. In my view, the writer of historical fiction has to be as precise as the historian when crafting the setting and characters. To be sure, fiction permits license. It is fiction, after all, but credibility is greatly enhanced when there is proper attention to historical detail. I suppose l’m an incurable romantic but I find the potential for character development strong when romance is involved. I try to create characters with depth and grit from my perspective as a man. Hopefully, my works do not present sentimental junk food. Faith, more particularly the Christian faith, is central to my writing. It opens a whole range of themes that are fundamental to human life – place of self, belief, the divine, sin, suffering, reconciliation, redemption, and salvation, among others.
As for the David Copperfield stuff (per Dickens and Salinger), I am a native Montanan, received a bachelor’s degree in Speech from the University of Redlands, as well as master’s and doctoral degrees in Speech Pathology and Speech Science from Purdue University. I live in southwest Missouri with my wife Jean Ann. We have five children and nine grandchildren. I continue to serve God through occasional teaching and preaching.