An eclectic background is perfect for being a novelist and a teacher.
I’ve been a freelance journalist, a lawyer, a design writer, a novelist, a graphic designer, an editor, a photographer, and a teacher. I've written articles, essays, profiles, interviews, stories, poems, design books, law books, and novels.
I also spent many years as a father at home. While my wife worked as a family physician, I was home with our two children. While they were at school during the day, I worked as a freelance writer and designer.
LAWYER
I graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1995 and passed the Michigan Bar. I did some work as a lawyer, but I quickly turned to legal journalism, legal marketing, and freelance writing.
Fresh out of law school, I met David Galbenski, an entrepreneur building a legal-services company. I interviewed him for an article I was writing for the ABA Journal. We hit it off, and I did many projects for him over the years, including two books, Legal Visionaries (2013) and Unbound (2009). I did the interviews, the writing, the illustrations, the typesetting, and the cover designs of those two books.
FREELANCE WRITER
I worked as a freelance writer for many years. When I was 22, I had my first article published in the magazine Details, thanks to editor David Keeps, who gave a fellow Michigander a chance. Over the years, I wrote for many periodicals, including Details, Detroit Monthly, Detroit Free Press, Mademoiselle, The New York Times, American Bar Association Journal, The American Prospect, Men’s Journal, Men’s Fitness, and many more.
AUTOMOTIVE WRITER
As a writer, photographer, and graphic designer, I worked for nine years in the automotive industry in Detroit. I worked on exhibits, magazines, training materials, and commemorative books for automotive clients, like UAW-Ford, UAW-GM, and UAW-Chrysler.
I started in the auto industry as a writer for a vendor. I quickly took on the roles of photographer and graphic designer. I’d visit the auto plants, interview people, take photos of those people at work, and then write the articles. For a quarterly magazine for UAW-Ford, I also took over the graphic design.
DESIGN WRITER
Because of that experience, I wrote about graphic design for design periodicals. The first thing I wrote was American Mutt Barks in the Yard, a book-length essay published in 2005 by Emigre and Princeton Architectural Press. It won the Winterhouse Award for Design Writing. (Read more about that book on this site here.)
That led me to write for design periodicals, like AIGA’s Voice, I.D., Print, Eye, Design Observer, and The New York Times, for which I once reviewed children’s books. My work was anthologized in design books and published in several languages. My collected design writing, There’s Nothing Funny About Design (2009), which I designed and typeset (with a cover illustration by Felix Sockwell), was published by Princeton Architectural Press.
FICTION WRITER
I’ve always loved writing fiction. I wrote short stories in college at the computer centers at the University of Michigan. I continued to write in law school. I even took a creative-writing class during law school.
As a freelance writer, I wrote journalism to pay the bills, but I wrote and published fiction online and in literary journals for the thrill of it. I wrote a little about that experience here.
I wrote Johnny Red, my first novel, before I turned thirty. It was published in 2005 by Jackie Corley at Word Riot Press. You can read more about that here on this site.
I wrote hundreds of stories, parodies, satires, poems, and other miscellany for a hundred zines and journals in the 2000s. I also published several story collections and my second novel, American Home Life (2007), published by So New Media. Check out my Published Writing page for more information.
TEACHER
For seven years, I was a thesis advisor and taught design writing in the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art. For three years, overlapping with my time at MICA, I taught design writing, electives, and the senior-thesis program at Winthrop University.
For eight years, I taught at Woodlawn School in North Carolina. I taught Language Arts in grades 7 and 8, English in grades 9 and 10, and electives in grades 6-12. I was faculty yearbook advisor for seven years, as well as the de facto school photographer, and I coached a basketball team or two.
I can tell you that my eclectic background in writing, law, business, fatherhood, design, photography, and everything else helped me immensely as a teacher of young students. I drew on that well of experience every day while I tried to do my best developing and delivering curricula for those amazing kids who kept me young at heart.
NOVELIST/TEACHER
While I was teaching at MICA, Winthrop, and Woodlawn, say, from 2010 to 2014, I kinda/sorta stopped writing fiction. I spent all my imaginative efforts on developing curricula. I had little energy left over for my own work.
I’m exaggerating slightly. I was still thinking about writing novels and taking notes about my novel ideas. I just wasn’t doing much to follow through on actually writing one.
In the summer of 2015, I started thinking about how I could use my summers off from teaching to write the first draft of a novel. I didn’t do much that summer, but I mustered the resolve that Thanksgiving break. I went off and hid in my aunt’s beach house and wrote the first draft of Smarthome Rebel. It was hurried and skeletal, more like a screenplay, but I did it.
And that started me on a new track. I taught during the school year. I wrote novels during the summers. I lived that crazy life until 2021.
NOVELIST
After that intense academic year of 2020-2021, I decided to take a break from teaching. I stopped teaching in June of 2021 to edit my novel manuscripts and to write new novels. And that’s where I still am today.
You can read the first chapters of my novels on this site by clicking Manuscripts in the header and scrolling down.
You can also read about my progress during my sabbatical on my blog at Writing Tips on this site.
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