Welcome!

I was raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and began my professional writing life as a scriptwriter and producer of live, high-school, multimedia auditorium shows for Rick Trow Productions in Philadelphia. Later, as a project editor for Harper & Row Media in New York, I wrote and produced educational programs for school and college curricula.

My first novel, Crush, is about two girls in boarding school who become irresistibly attracted to each other. Published in 1981 by Little, Brown, and later in paperback by Avon and Alyson, Crush was dubbed by one reviewer an “underground lesbian classic.” That same year, Holt, Rhinehart and Winston released my travel book, with photographs by Robert Conover, called Marin: The Place, The People, later published in paperback by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Avon Books brought out my second novel, Promise Not to Tell, in 1991. In it, a troubled teenager at his family vacation home in Maine tries to protect a friend when she confides that her boss is molesting her.

In Dream Lover, published by Alyson Publications in 1995, two women attracted to each other as girls, meet again as adults. The results are turbulent!

I joined the staff of the Marin Independent Journal in 1995, serving as editorial writer and reporter for nearly a decade, and winning California Newspaper Publishers Association awards for two series — on breast cancer and homelessness.

In 1999, my wife and I bought 160 acres in the mountains of inland Mendocino County, moving there with our two miniature long-haired dachshunds in 2004. Women Gone Wild is a memoir about how we came to love bears, rattlesnakes, coyotes, pot and living in the middle of nowhere.

From 2015 to 2018, I hosted and produced a biweekly news and public affairs radio show called “The Cannabis Hour” for KZYX/Mendocino County Public Broadcasting.

Love, medicine and war ignite pain and passion in Fever in Their Bones, my newest novel, in which a World War One physician risks his reputation fighting for his patients’ lives while engaging in a secret romance. Back at home, his wife has fallen in love with the children’s nurse.

A collection of my short stories, Heat, is coming soon!