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I’ve built this website to introduce myself and provide a taste of what to expect from each of my books. As for me, although writing is all I ever wanted to do, I also felt the need for experience to write about. As a result, I didn’t major in literature or journalism in college, didn’t opt for an MFA in creative writing and submitted to the PhD process only when I found myself jobless in a small university town.
Meanwhile, I exploited my facility with words, working as a technical writer and an advertising copywriter, editing a weekly newspaper, serving as a radio and print journalist in Moscow, winning a grant to study Hindi at Delhi University and translating a Pakistani poet’s work from Urdu into English (Four Walls and a Black Veil by Fahmida Riaz). Even when posted to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the Dominican Republic, Pakistan and India as a public diplomacy officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, I chose the word-heavy press and information side. Off duty, I plunged into the uniqueness of each culture.
My own words began trickling out long before I retired, but when I left the Foreign Service the flow of fiction and poetry intensified. Nor did I renounce my interest in diplomacy and global issues. With an ex-foreign service officer I hadn’t met during our years of service, I’m a co-founder of WhirledView (www. whirledview.typepad.com), a blog that focuses on foreign affairs, although it strays into U.S. politics, law, culture and travel as well. And here’s a great thing about retired life: I’ve time to enjoy my friends and family (two sons, a daughter-in-law and a grandson) and hiking in the mountains.
Long before socially-conscious poetry became critically respectable again, I prefaced A Partial Rainbow Makes No Sense, my first collection of poems, with a protest:
ANEMIA
You want me to be i-
ronic,
to approach
by in-
direction and speak (if I must)
through un-
derstatement. Anything else,
(you say) is un-
poetic,
like a boot stomping a violet,
I suppose. But facing killers,
I say: NO!
Having lived in the lands of the un-
derfed and the un-
enfranchised and the in-
defensible, I say it
again: NO!
Real poems don’t rage? Can’t
convey the pain of an arm
macheted off, shock
the only anesthetic? Can’t
fix on a girl’s frozen eyes
watching a shirt go red
as bullets make a sieve
of Daddy-Father-Papa’s chest?
Wouldn’t stoop
to playing back, un-
damped,
the primal scream
that erupts when memory gets un-
plugged and horrible things
rush out?
This coyness that’s praised,
this pastelized soft porn
that never groans or grunts
or barfs,
this pay dirt
for critics and scholars in-
tervening to in-
terpret
for the masses, is it elegant in-
direction? Or evasion?
Delicacy or anemia?
Ambiguity or
simple lack
of care-
ing?