At its heart, my new book, Have You Seen My Soulmate?: A Globe-Trotter’s Bumbling Search For True Love is an absurd love story that spans three-decades and many far-flung international locales. There’s plenty of travel misadventures, lust, love, loss, regret, parenthood, senile cats–the arc of my adult life. I’d spent the bulk of my twenties, thirties, and even a chunk of my forties leaping blindly into the unknown, buying one-way tickets with the ingenious plan of “Figure it out when I get ther...

You probably have that person in your life who is on the forgetful side.The family member who might now and again leave the burner on after boiling water for tea. Now imagine if that person left the burner on, without fail, every time he used the stove. Now imagine that he doesn’t even need hot water, but just walks over, turns on the burner, and walks away. That’s my dad. Ten years ago my father was diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset dementia known as Pick’s Disease. I was teaching on th...

Spokane Coeur d' Alene Living Magazine: Artist Profile

A short story published in Straylight Literary Arts Magazine (Volume 8.2)

Pha Phang is a tiny highland village in the northern mountains of Laos. There are five huts for the five Hmong families, along with a free-roaming assortment of chickens, ducks, potbellied pigs, a couple of cows with protruding ribs, and three wiry dogs. It is a two-day walk and eight-hour boat ride down the Mekong River from anything resembling civilization. It is not where you want to find yourself, as I did, with a parasitic-fueled fever coupled with violent diarrhea, draining me of the energ