I've been writing since the age of 8, and have been compelled to do so throughout my life.  One of my favorite jobs was working as a technical writer for Sociological Abstracts, which taught me a degree of minimalism and conciseness.  These traits could explain my love of haiku and poets like William Carlos Williams. After reading the French memoirs of my great-great uncle, Aron Simanovitch, who was Rasputin's Jewish secretary, I was stunned to learn that Rasputin was maligned by the anti-Semitic Russian aristocracy because he fought for equal rights for Jews in tsarist Russia.  I felt it my duty to reverse the prevailing evil view of Rasputin, which was fabricated by the nobility, to show his social activism and anti-war stance.  While several others who knew him had tried to do the same thing, they did not substantiate their work by citing corroborating evidence. I spent a dozen years gathering such evidence.  

My undergraduate work was in French; my graduate studies were in Clinical Psychology.