ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ernest Hemingway once wrote about writers, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” What he meant, I think, is that as writers we never finish learning, never arrive at a still point where we are satisfied and have no room to grow. We can always become better.

Stories don’t spill out of an author fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Instead, we write a draft, then rewrite and rewrite. We have other writers critque our stories to help us get them right. When we're done, we go on to write another.

After my wife and I retired—she from teaching public school and I from clinical psychology—we moved to the mountains of North Carolina, where we live with our dog and two cats. In the last couple of years I have been writing fiction again after a long hiatus, largely at my wife’s prodding. I have been fortunate to have had more than twenty of my stories accepted for publication by literary magazines. Some of them are accessible online, while other are only available by subscription or in print. One recent story, not yet published, was the runner-up in the James Hurst Short Fiction Prize, sponsored by North Carolina State University.