I began to write for a Bloomington magazine, the Ryder Magazine of the Arts, in 1996. Since 1997, as part of my duties there, I have written an annual preview of the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival, which occurs in late September in Bloomington. I was also the TV emcee for the Festival until I moved ridiculously far away.
Over the years, I have studied ten foreign languages. I write in Spanish, French and Portuguese, and I have studied Irish with the goal of writing original fiction in the language of my ancestors. You can see a poem I wrote in Irish if you follow the Poetry link.
I began to write music when I was four years old. I started taking drum lessons from Keith Leach when I was five, and I picked up the guitar (with some pointers from Earl Reinert) when I was 21. I have composed enough songs to fill six CDs. In the 1990s I had a band in Bloomington, which was a lot of fun. I'll be posting samples of my demo recordings for your perusal.
A long-term project of mine is to have a digital recording of every Top 40 hit song. At one point I was limiting myself to 1955-1999, but now I have hit songs from 1890-2006, so I hope at some point to be able to claim to have one of the largest archives of pop hits in the country. Right now, I am at about 6,000 Top 40 hits. See my Music Collection.
I am also a teacher of Spanish. I taught at Merrillville High School in 1983-84, then at Indiana University from 1984 to 1993. I picked up the profession again in 1998 in West Michigan, and now I teach at St. John's Preparatory School in Collegeville, Minnesota.
Apart from this quick overview, you can learn much more about me by following the links to the left. I hope my site introduces you to some concepts you have not discovered on your own. Thanks for reading.