How do you even begin to define yourself without narrowing down who you are? Nicknames perhaps exemplify this. In grade school they called me Skip, Skipper or Skippy, I guess because I liked to skip everywhere and was better at it than even the girls. In high school they called me Rock. Don't ask why; it's a long story and a misnomer anyway. In Vietnam I was Rootie, mostly because a friend there couldn't say Rizzuti. After that I was Roscoe & Rizzo for several years, then Tooto in graduate school. Now I'm pretty much just T or T-Man.

I think what this says is that others have had trouble defining me, too, and have thus boiled me down to one letter, the least common denominator of written language. And I think this is true also of my writing which has led to difficulty finding publishers. After all, how do you define work that refuses to fit within a single genre or standard category?

So I usually just call my stuff literary fiction because that's what I strive for -- a sense that what I've created is literature as opposed to "just a story" or "just a novel" -- the distinction being that literature not only entertains but through metaphor achieves a didactic function as well. I therefore first and foremost seek that mysterious interface between form and function, i.e., the relationship between the structure of a piece and its message.

And I've often thought if all my work were ever showcased in one place, like for example the way it is here on AuthorsDen, I'd like the collective novels called "Food for Thought Fiction," because hopefully they make you think; and I'd like an anthology of the short stories called "Heads or Tails," because when you try to pin them down, to label them, it's a toss of the coin whether you've placed them in the right category.

Notice that I haven't mentioned poetry. That's because my "stuff" is so weak, so amateurish, it doesn't rate mentioning. I forget who it was, but someone once said a novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet. Could be some truth in that, but I don't believe it for a second. I think we all write in whichever form speaks through us best.

Anyway, maybe it's relevent that I was raised Italian-American in upstate New York, joined the Marine Corps in 1966 at age 19, went to Vietnam that same year and was wounded the next. Ten years later I graduated from the University of Oklahoma with an English Literature degree, and by that point it was clear to me that I wanted to write about war, especially its effects on the psyche, my psyche. It wasn't until some 20 years later that I found myself drawn to other subjects, for example veterans' issues, strong women living difficult lives, and even children's stories.

And maybe it's relevent that my major literary influences have been the mid-19th century writers like Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville, as well as the 20th century works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. I'm especially drawn to anything with dark humor and contemporary writing aspects. My absolute favorite writer is Cormac McCarthy, whose command of the English language supersedes that of anyone writing today. I'm so glad he finally got a Pulitzer. Maybe now his masterpiece Blood Meridian will get the recognition it deserves.

It could further be relevent that over the past 25 years, I have become a big believer in therapeutic art (i.e., art as therapy), whether that art take the form of writing, music, painting, wood working, or any other creative means of channeling negative energies into positive outcomes. Specifically, what I've discovered is that writing can add a layer of fiction between its creator and his "real" or actual experience, that that layer of fiction creates a buffer zone within which the writer can "play around" with the experience in ways that are therapeutic. In essence, I'm saying my writing has become for me a lifeboat in an otherwise inner tempestuous storm of intrusive thoughts and feelings. That's not to say that art erases the turbulence, not by any stretch, but rather that it provides a means of psychic survival. I'm very thankful for that, personally, and I hope my stories can provide some similar value for you. Enjoy!