I grew up on the High Plains of Eastern Colorado, in a four-generation newspaper family. I started cleaning toilets and sweeping up around the presses when I was nine and started writing for the paper when I was in my mid teens. My mother was the only feminist in Eastern Colorado, and early on she had us boycotting products that were endorsed by anyone who spoke out against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. My fiction often features strong women, no doubt attributable to my mother's influence.

From there, I studied art history and journalism at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and, after graduating, got my first job with the newspaper in Fort Myers, Florida. I was a lowly reporter when I met my wife Carol, the advertising director and a Kansas native. Eight years older than me and in management, she was forbidden fruit, but I was inexplicably drawn to her and began to pursue in earnest.

We married, Carol soon gave birth to Haley Joy, and our family began moving across the country (Rochester, New York; St. Paul, Minnesota) as Carol trained for her dream job of newspaper publisher. I stayed home with our daughter and wrote freelance magazine articles.

Carol landed her first publisher job in Macon, Georgia, and it was living in this beautiful, quirky city that first inspired me to write fiction. We've since returned to Fort Myers, where we live in a 1951 ranch-style home on the Caloosahatchee River. Carol is publisher of the paper where we met, and I'm still the primary caregiver of the family. I try to get my writing done while my daughter's at school. Fiction writing and housework complement each other well; one is brain-intensive, the other is brain-dead, and after struggling on a paragraph for twenty minutes, folding the white load provides a welcome respite.

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My Favorites

• Target
• Indian food
• Curious people who ask questions
• Home Depot
• The obscure novels published by the New York Review of Books
• Watching movies on the couch with Carol and Haley
• Kayaking
• Museums of any kind
• Steamed clams
• Driving my daughter to school every day
• Furniture shopping
• Using my hammer drill
• Art by obscure regional artists
• Weight-lifting
• Weekends in Key West with my wife (far too infrequent)
• Mangoes
• Cocktails at 5 o'clock
• My cats, Sophie, who has three legs, and Tomas, who was found buried alive in a plastic trash bag when he was three weeks old. (This explains the appearance of the bizarre cat scene in my novel, Househusband)
• Working in the garden
• Cooking ethnic food
• Green politics
• Bookreporter.com
• Pine Island, Florida
• Birding
• Cruciferous vegetables - especially cabbage

And my favorite books:

• How Green was my Valley by Richard Llewellyn
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
• Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
• Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag
• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
• The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence
• Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
• The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
• Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
• Crooked River Burning by Mark Winegardner
• I'll Go to Bed at Noon by Gerard Woodward