About

A Portrait in Brief: First, I’ve done freelance work as a copyeditor and writer for two small California publishers and taught English at the University of Akron for sixteen years. I’ve also published a few pieces and collected several honorable mentions. The big things I’m tackling right now are a short story collection called Tight Spaces, a memoir, I Have a Lot of Bad Days, and a novel tentatively titled Always – all pretty much simultaneously. You can probably tell that writing is almost more important than breathing.

Two of my other passions are ballroom dancing and cooking. I’ve compiled a cookbook called Pojesti, Slovenian for “Come and Eat,” for my three children (all adults now) that contains family recipes and dishes I’ve concocted myself over the past few years, including parenthetical asides I hope will bring back memories of the fun we’ve had over the years in the kitchen and at the dinner table. And we have had great fun. But this cookbook is more than that – it is a scrapbook of family memories and photos as much as it is of food – and was a true joy to put together and give them a few Christmases ago. As they put it, it was the best Christmas present they ever received.

I followed that up a year later with Roots: A Gnarled History of Our Family – a collection of biographies and stories (with photos, newspaper clippings, even a copy of my grandparents’ Slovenian marriage license which I loosely translated. It, like Pojesti, was an instant hit and turned into another family treasure. It’s safe to say I don’t get much sleep, hence the dark bags under my eyes. But I love what I do and wouldn’t want it any other way.

Now to the blog I’ve created here and what it’s about.

Blah, Blah, Blah… – that certainly sums up a lot of conversations, texts, and emails, doesn’t it? Meaningless drivel. Words to fill an empty silence. Words to bury what one really thinks or feels.

Keep talking – maybe no one will notice, discover, question.

People seem to have developed the habit of talking way too much these days with chatter that is often pointless – or the same old stuff they’re always talking about. BORING.

There are times, however, when someone hits on something really interesting, something you can really take a deep swig of, something that lingers around the edges of your brain long after the discussion is over. If we engage in “the formal interchange of thoughts” in a reasonable way – one mindful and respectful of others’ thoughts and ideas – we’re likely to find something of value, something that matters to us. To you. To me.

What are we going to talk about here? Things that really matter – and things that don’t so much but which still pique our interest. We’ll just be a bunch of gabbers pretty much “in the moment” – no topic too sacred for these pages – well, let’s qualify that last statement with a “maybe.”

If you have topic suggestions, I’d love to hear them – sometimes the best ideas have their genesis in the conversations we have with others.