I was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and lived in the San Fernando Valley until 1975, excluding one year in 1972-73 when I lived in Vienna, Austria and traveled in Spain, Italy, France and England. In 1975 I moved to Michigan to attend graduate school. I lived in Pentwater, Michigan, for three years, a town of 900 people on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. After six years in Champaign, Illinois, teaching (and playing tennis with David Foster Wallace, who later became a quite famous writer), I returned to California, first to San Diego County, then to Sacramento, and finally to Santa Rosa, where I have lived and taught since 1988. I currently live in Sebastopol with my wife Ann, who also teaches at SRJC. My daughter Molly is a freshman at the University of Washington and my son Eric is a Junior at Sacramento State University, majoring in music.
When I was 20 years old I experienced an inexplicable and powerful transformation, a single evening of sleep during which I must have been visited by angels or demons, for when I awoke (this was in December, 1969) I was a different person than I had been the day before. Every plan I had thought was set in stone lay in tatters at my feet; my life was moving in one direction one day, and another direction the next. I cannot explain this event, 45 years ago, but it has stayed with me all that time and, in the past 20 years, has informed my teaching. I am ever watchful and alert to radical change in myself and my students, and my approach to teaching reflects this awareness. I will retire from full-time teaching on May 24, 2015.