My first published writing credit came when as a kid I had a letter to the editor published in a "Superman" comic book. Later, I started writing art reviews for a neighborhood newspaper. I made twenty dollars an article. I didn't even have a bank account at the time, but the bank at the corner cashed the weekly checks for me anyway. Far more meaningful to me, though, was having my byline in print. The newspaper gig led to writing for other publications, including "Art News" and "Art New England."  



      At one point I submitted a review to the paper that was written in the guise of a short story. I had no idea if the paper would publish it, but they did. I suppose you could say that was my first foray into fiction.  


      Later still, I almost felt the earth shift under my feet when I discovered the works of Dostoevsky -- particularly Notes from Underground and the blistering rage it contained, but also Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. That led to an exploration of other Russian writers: Gogol and Chekhov especially, Tolstoy and Turgenev to a lesser extent. I seemed to sense a great kinship with these artists. There was something in their depictions of idiosyncratic individuals at the mercy of their massive, roiling society that spoke to me. 


      Other writers would come to mean a great deal as well. I remember first reading Raymond Carver and thinking that, for the first time, someone was writing about people I knew in my own life - the way they talked, the things they worried about. I felt the heat that rose from pages of the explosively inventive novels of William Faulkner. There are so many more.


      I began writing stories and trying to get them published. The stories were a way of getting out ideas that I couldn't talk to anyone about. In time I published a collection, Some of Us Have to Get Up in the Morning, and then another, Pay This Amount.  I won awards for my work from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others.  


      I'm thrilled to be publishing my first novel, VALEDICTORY, with Savant Books and Publications.