I grew up in Mississippi, lived in New York in the '70s and returned to Mississippi where my wife and I published a weekly newspaper and later a literary and fine arts magazine called Mississippi Arts & Letters. We now live in Olympia, Washington. I write theater and art reviews for newspapers in Western Washington.

Major influences early on were Faulkner and Steinbeck and later John Irving. More recently I've been influenced by Cormac McCarthy, Richard Russo, Pat Conroy and Salman Rushdie.