I was born in Galax, Virginia and raised for the first 7 years of my life in a redwood house next to the New River, between Independence, Virginia and Mouth-of-Wilson, Virginia.

I was the first born child to a beautiful woman of 20 and the third born to a sexy attorney of 45. (In all, Sanna Jean, my mother, was married 6 times and my father, Lorne, 4 times - my mother married the same man 3 times and my father married 1 woman for a friend of his).

I am a first generation American on my father’s side. Dad was born in Canada after his parents, my paternal grandparents, emigrated to Canada from Scotland.

I wrote my first story at the age of ten. It was about a little boy who was kicked by a cow and took flight around the planet. And take flight I did when I graduated from high school in 1973.

After much traveling and transferring and drama, I graduated from Thomas Jefferson College in Michigan with a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy. (It has served me well.)

Before that, I attended Hampden-Sydney College in Farmville, Virginia; Southern Seminary in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. I was also accepted at what is now known as Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

I attended the Carter/Mondale Democratic Convention in New York in 1976, hanging with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden and Jerry Brown. We were all about future President, Jimmy Carter. And rightly so, in retrospect.

Then, in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the White House, with his successful southern strategy which included the Moral Majority, I had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for a month (see memoir).

In 1984, I attended the Mondale/Ferraro Democratic Convention in San Francisco.

In 1988, I moved to Vashon Island off the coast of Seattle with my future husband. My goal was to hide out. I was scared, scarred and emotionally exhausted. My friends started dying of AIDS in the early 80s and by the end of the decade nearly all my male friends and creative comrades in LA had died. In Seattle, the cartoonist, painter and writer Tom Young and I finished an original screenplay, STONEWALL, later titled, A FULL MOON AND JUDY GARLAND’S FUNERAL, based around the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969. The screenplay was a finalist at the Sundance Film Festival Screenplay Competition in 1987 and was dedicated to Tom Young. He was too sick to attend the Festival with me. He died of AIDS in 1989.

Before I moved from Vashon Island, I wrote the short story, LELA MAE, about my maternal grandmother, who died in 1991. LELA MAE appeared in the Anthology, BOYHOOD, GROWING UP MALE, which was published by The Crossing Press in 1993 and republished in 1998 by The University of Wisconsin Press.

A few years later my novel, DANCING ON THE CELLAR DOOR, was published. To follow that success right up to present day, please look to your right and you can read the writing Journey of my life since then, in Journal form. (Formerly called a Blog, but this website is set in its ways, this sounds like the beginning of a joke but it isn’t. That I have no idea how to change DAVID’S BLOG to DAVID’S JOURNAL just proves that it should not be changed. Perhaps that’s a good thing, historically.)

2020: COVID-19 DAYS
My fingers are dancing across the keyboard like Snowy Plover chicks running from the surf at the Strand.