My recent work of fiction for young adults, Martin Truemartin, reflects the variety of influences in my reading experience, ranging from the adventuresome fantasy of Robert L. Stevenson, the powerful magic of Ray Bradbury and the broad perspective of humanism of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, to mention a scant few of a much broader index of favorites.

  My study of languages also influnced my literary interest and style and, while my primary literary  focus has always been poetry, I began to successfully adapt my poetic journeys to prose and, more recently, to story form. I have come to believe that we are not of ourselves but of others. We are conscious witnesses to the movement of the world, the sweep of events. This is an inevitable consequence of our self-awareness and our imagination. Through writing, we harvest the fruit of our experience and we may bequeath the lessons of the collective assaults on our lives to the virtual generations to follow…and we do this with a vague grimace, all too cognizant of the subjective nature of our convictions.

   Personally, writing helps me to positively acknowledge life. Through my ‘writer’s cum poet’s eyes,’ a rock is no longer just a rock but a mystery and a blessing. I hear its song and I must sing it to those who are unable to hear…or to see. A writer’s imagination can be as fertile at times as to set words to emerge from every tree or rock and can be so remarkably visionary that the universe may seem to take on the very structure of the human soul.