About Me

The account of my life is not so much a chronological list of what I have done or achieved, but more so what I have discovered, what has driven me, and what I wanted to share in some form of art.

I spent the first half my life in the South painting, writing, taking photos, and daydreaming of doing any one of them for a living. With my parent’s mantra ringing in my ears, I attended the University of Georgia and landed a corporate job. My true longings never left my side, and within a few years, I left the stable world of corporate America. On a whim to explore outside my zone of comfort I ended up in Vermont. I continued to write, accumulating thousands of pages of hopeful novels. My wife began her Medical Residency in Charleston, S.C., where I started a small farm, took care of our daughter, spent three years painting and writing. There we had a second child, a son. We returned to Vermont, a wonderful place to raise children and settle with rigor into one’s dreams.

The South never left me. Bound by a vigorous curiosity of its personality, both the light and dark side, I experimented, emptying my feelings onto paper. I could not escape the idiosyncratic side of human nature, and in that regard the South is like no other. The question was how to capture the essence of an almost eccentric and mythical place. A place of frustration and love of equal intensity. In that journey I went back to my own roots spread across the south. There I saw the dark side and felt blessed for seeing it. I saw the humor in all its complexity and laughed as hard as any man. I have traveled with people I knew I should not, stayed the course to see where their idiocy would lead us. I hitchhiked to see the unknown, walked into beauty and gloom, all to find another hidden corner of the South’s seemingly improvised nature. I wrote in search of the words to express its eccentricity, its slow beautiful voice, and for a peculiar magic that exists there on so many levels.

I came to realize that what I was searching for was an invisible fabric underneath the South. That image hit me hard. I needed to define that web, that ether of southern soul and spirit, and through it, give my characters and their underlying story the merit they deserve. I sought the satirical, the macabre, the gothic pulses. The sweetness, the scent of magnolia, and happy endings. I find inspiration in true love as well as the vanities that make that fall. The web is an open secret, a force threading passion, imperfection, tragedy, humor, the inane and bizarre, into even a single day. The southern web is sultry. It is beneath the sweet inflection of a woman’s voice and all that loud kindness calling out across the land. It is the slithering snake, the echo of woodpeckers, and in the swish of breeze through pines and palm. And then there is no escaping the things that are intolerable. A disgrace covering the world. Bigotry and homophobia.

And so, I have written The Steep Side of the Marble with my beautiful, tragic, inexplicable, and humorous South as a tailwind.