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As a writer and psychotherapist, my work focuses on figuring out how to communicate, understand, and connect with people. It's also been my work as a single father, friend and partner.If you're sincerely committed to all of this, you realize that connecting and communicating is always a work in progress. Whenever I think I know it all, I try to take that as a cue to keep learning.
Today we're seriously awash in anxiety, despair, confusion, anger, denial, hard partying and endless acquiring of things. Although it's difficult when you feel that your back's against the wall, if we're going to save ourselves and the people and things we care most about, our only salvation lies not in any pie-in-the-sky afterlife but in talking, listening and trying to understand each other. In therapy, writing, reading, loving--even unfortunately in fighting--we're all living and dying together. Our responsibility--to ourselves, to others, and to the world—has to be mutual.
I've been in sensory deprivation tanks and on solitary wilderness backpacking trips, hitchhiked around the country and Europe, ridden two freight trains, and been a psychotherapist and writer for 40 years. I've learned that while isolation's an important time for renewal and an occasional necessary retreat for resting and restocking, coming back into connection with others is always the ultimate goal.
That's the heart of my memoir. Good to the Last Drop: Living in Mortality's Shadow, which takes a vivid and unflinching look at how, through a series of adventures and missteps, I examined and fought with my own anxieties and learned how to care for others and to love. Through the connections I created, with myself and with others, I've done my best to make my time here more meaningful.
My other works have appeared in Tusculum Review, TriQuarterly, Fatal Flaw, Perigee, Bloodroot, Rockhurst Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Psychotherapy Networker and Blue Mountain Review. My essay "Hope At the Edge" was a finalist in NottingHill Edition's 2016 International Essay Contest, and I was a finalist in Midwest Review's 2019 essay contest.