about me

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Twenty years ago, I moved to New York and went to work for Greenpeace, trying to convince people of the realities of global warming, organizing against the James Bay II hydroelectric project in Quebec, and protesting at the U.N. against the first Gulf War. I then went to the Nevada Test Site to stop nuclear testing, which brought me into contact with the Western Shoshone Indian Nation. This part of my life can be found in "Greenpeace: Witness" (Andre Deutsch Books, 1996) and "The Way It Is" by Corbin Harney (Blue Dolphin, 1995). It was coming out of Las Vegas that I hopped a freight train for the first time with my good friend, Hobo from Hell Lee, who has been featured in any number of documentaries (including “Catching Out”) and self-publishes his own zine, "There’s Something about a Train".
This was followed by a brief stint in ACORN, the Association of Community Groups for Reform Now, whose annual organizers conference brought me to New Orleans and began a life-long fascination with the Crescent City. After taking a couple of years off to travel around the country, I eventually landed back in New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras and, much like my main character in "Voodoo Inferno", I met a woman there (a couple, actually) and ended up staying for a lot longer than I should have.
Another brief tour took me up the East Coast, where I spent time in D.C. lobbying Congress on constitutional and environmental issues, helped pass a local referendum on nuclear disarmament and brought Corbin Harney and his Healing Global Wounds Pow-Wow to the Nation’s Capitol. This led to a medicine ceremony with the Piscataway Indians of Eastern Maryland and a three inner-city tour with Everybody’s Kitchen, a mobile free kitchen bus, sharing food with the homeless and underprivileged. I ended up studying eastern philosophy under a Buddhist monk of the Nipponzan Myohoji order in upstate New York, Jun Yasuda, an amazing woman who inadvertently made her way into the afterword of "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse" by Peter Matthiessen.
Then it was back to New York City, where I joined the Lower East Side Squatters community. Having born witness to the police brutality of the riots in Tompkins Square Park years earlier helped round out much of my political philosophy. Now I was actively engaged in fighting Giuliani’s gentrification of the city, first at Glass House and later at the squats on East 13th Street, where my son was conceived. Five years later, after pitched battles on both 5th and 9th streets and following the tragedy of 9/11 (of which many of our people were first responders), the squatters finally won ownership of the remaining eleven buildings from the city administration. These events can be found chronicled in "Tompkins Square Park" by Q. Sakamaki (Powerhouse Books, 2008), "Glass House" by Margaret Morton (Penn State, 2004), "Selling the Lower East Side" by Christopher Mele (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), "Each One Teach One" by Ron Casanova (Curbstone, 1996), and an amazingly boring documentary, “Your House Is Mine”, available on Google Videos.
After the events on East 13th Street, I returned out west to work with Earth First!, fighting the salvage logging sales of ancient old growth forests in Idaho, Oregon and Northern California and helping the fledgling Buffalo Nations prevent the decimation of the Yellowstone Bison herds. Again, this time in my life can be found in various chapters of "Tree Huggers" by Kathie Durbin (The Mountaineers, 1996), "Tree Spiker" by Mike Roselle (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), the epilogue of "Bring Back the Buffalo!" by Earnest Callenbach (University of California Press, 1996), and a wonderful documentary on our eighteen month blockade at Warner Creek , “Pickaxe”, by another good friend, Tim Ream, also available on Google Videos (two enthusiastic thumbs way up!). One of my friends from those times, Brad Will, went on to become an Indymedia journalist until he was shot and killed by the police during an uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico.
A happy marriage and years of parenthood have grounded me in the years since and I now content myself as a successful general contractor and construction manager, impatiently awaiting the rise of greener building standards and zero emission energy efficiency. My work has been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone Magazine, and on “Sex and the City”. But in the wee hours of the morning, when I moonlight as a writer of creative fiction, I still find some of that old flame of youth burning bright.

favourite books

"Fight Club" by Chuck Palahiuk
"Monkey Wrench Gang" by Edward Abbey
"Soon to Be A Major Motion Picture" by Abbie Hoffman
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

my websites