Bio
l have no recollection of it but my family tells me that when I was five or six I would sit at the dinner table and tell stories while they ate (back when families used to sit around the dinner table to eat), all the while inventing wild, outrageous tales about things I'd seen that day or had conjured up.
These strange, absurd stories launched what would become a life-long enthusiasm for fabulation and entertaining, writing my first novel when I was 13 going on 14 and writing a monthly newpaper column in the early 1990s.
After growing up in a variety of towns in the midwest (and a short detour in the deep south), I graduated from the University of Iowa in 1998. In 2001 my novel “Approaching Lightness” won the Great Rivers Writing Group First Novel Prize.
In 2009, I parlayed my years as an independent insurance adjuster into a non-fiction book, "The Claim Game: A Homeowner's Guide to Surviving an Insurance Catastrophe."
Always writing, I’ve taken to also designing and making stuff (HawkWingDesign) and working on a never-ending project to be documented in the forthcoming blog "An Acre of House."