I grew up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. It was a tough neighborhood and I learned to be nimble and fast on my feet, but on a few occasions I wasn't fast enough. I was a quiet kid, a good boy, but being good was a state of mind and was only one of many to choose from when growing up. I was considered an exceptional athlete and sports was a major influence in my life. The Rutland Little League was a big hadoo back then and I played shortstop and pitched. I also ice skated at Prospect Park on winter weekends, bowled at Freddie Fitzsimmons Bowling Alley, was a pro at Stoop Ball and Hit-The -Penny and couldn't get enough of Stickball. I also took great interest in the museums and the library up on Eastern Parkway and became Captain of the crossing guards at school. Sometimes, when I wasn't so good, I got five-finger discounts at a candy store around the corner from Empire Boulevard and scrawled a few things I shouldn't have on the side of our tenement buildings. However, my greatest influence on my writing was reading. In my spare time, and there was plenty back then, I read everything I could grab hold of. When books and magazines were in short supply, I read the 1963 World Book Encyclopedia with the crazy pullouts. Over time, I would stay in my room reading mystery books and horror stories and westerns to the point that I had to be booted outside on sunny days. It was great consternation to my family that reading was slowly overtaking baseball and basketball as my primary avocation. I suppose I was bored but I realize now that hitting a slow curve or sinking a long two couldn't compete with the greater adventures I discovered in books.

I first started writing poems when I was 11. I remember my first poem was selected by my elementary school to be read at graduation night. The theme, of course, was America: the Beautiful, and I chose to write about JFK whose passing we mourned en masse behind our little chain link world almost a year prior. I remember the last two lines of my tribute: "John F. Kennedy was the man we had loved, Now his great soul rests above." There was a sprinkling of polite applause. That sprinkling was like a spark, igniting a dangerous hunt for approval that even today, burns bright. I didn't know it at the time, but I had a distinct affinity for words, their musicality, their ability to be mixed and mingled in infinite ways. I think it was the sound of language rather than its meaning that first drew me to writing and the rhythm and melody of words slapped carefully together that still moves me today.

The fact that I can get out of bed each day is inspiration enough. Also walking my daughter's dog, Charley, who makes it abundantly clear I'd better get up now or I'll regret it later.

My favorite authors are people who write for a loving, those who devote time and energy to something that may or may not yield economic rewards. Some successful authors I admire are Philip Roth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Butler Yeats, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Albert Camus, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, Homer....a very eclectic mix. I pinwheel between styles and factions and trends. I try to experiment and emulate and move mountains as big as Olympus and traverse rocky ground littered with rabbit holes. I'm too old to stay fixed in one place for very long. That's graveyard talk. One day I swear by Steven Millhauser, the next day my allegiance takes a complete 180 and I can't get enough of Elmore Leonard. Today I read a lot of biography and crime stories. When I'm reading Erik Larson I'm a happy camper.

I like quiet, lots of it, and coffee. I can't write with any kind of background music like some writers do, and I can't abide outside noise. An aberrant lawn mower starting up down the street makes me homicidal. Morning is the best time for me to write and by afternoon I'm tapped out. I get confused rather easily and because I don't use index cards and files and since all the stuff I'm working on is compiled, box on box, in my head, I can't afford to be distracted. It's not the best way to compose but my deficits are such that any block-up in the steady flow puts me off for hours and I have to leave my desk and come back later and start again.

I'm writing a sequel to THE TURNING OF TABLES and putting up some short stories on Smashwords.

If I had any, they'd mean a hell of a lot. I don't write with a fan base in mind. The last few lines of an old poem I wrote suggests the reason that I most likely write:

" ....those services are cheap but not my breath-taking hurt
I refuse to be smothered or buried in dirt
though I rag all day my upper portion’s on alert
to locate the audience when they start
clapping to themselves in the belly of my heart."

I wanted to write a sort of amusing travelogue about living on a lonely Island out in the Sound until Susan, my wise and beautiful wife, suggested I chuck a corpse in somewhere just so someone would bother reading the damn thing. I took the critique in stride, added a corpse, thought of additional people I possibly knew who maybe I'd like to knock off as well, pieced them carefully into the narrative, had them breathe their last, and realized when it was way too late, that I was hooked. THE TURNING OF TABLES is about the appeal of loneliness enfolded into a thriller. Loneliness to me is not exactly an absence of loved ones or friends or amusements but an inescapable understanding of the deeper rhythms of life here on our planet. So when I say loneliness is appealing what I mean is that personal truths are most evident and most easily revealed when one is wandering or just sitting or just being alone. My narrator, Raney Tables, arrives at this conclusion the hard way, without even realizing it's happened. The other basic theme of the book is love, or actually it's arrival, suddenly, dramatically, in Raney's case. He arrives at love's doorstep exactly at the moment when he's in most danger of losing it forever which brings us full circle back to the thriller element of the novel.