I grew up in Ohio but left to attend Michigan State University and never looked back.  At MSU, I developed a love for cheap beer, stogie cigars, and Twentieth Century American literature.  I rabidly consumed Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, but also Baldwin, Burgess, Heller, Updike, Donleavy, and Barth.  What wonderful times these were. 

 

English degree in hand, I departed East Lansing for Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan Law School. I then joined a large Detroit law firm and started a career in the high stakes/high stress field of commercial real estate development and construction.  In my practice, I found an industry filled with precocious and eccentric individuals who managed to be simultaneously aggravating and entertaining—fertile ground for storytelling.   I later escaped for about a decade to the Northern Michigan resort town of Traverse City.  There, I dialed back my Big Law clientele, taking on locals who sometimes paid me in fresh eggs, cases of wine, and even furniture.   I resumed reading voraciously, discovering John Irving and getting reacquainted with Updike and Heller.  I stuck my toe into writing short stories.  Then Big Law came calling, and I returned to Detroit.

 

The law was very good to me, but my love for literature never left, and in recent years I have started writing again.  Liam’s Lady is my debut novel.

 

I now live in Ann Arbor, with my actress wife and our beagle Marley, a very good boy.