I harbor a strong belief that people and places are often inextricably connected. When you travel throughout the United States, you will find dozens of cities named Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson.  Parents sometimes name their children after the places that they are originally from like Dakota, Brooklyn or Georgia. America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer. People are sentimental about where they are from. Typically, one of the first things someone volunteers about themselves is the name of their town or city. If you visit almost any website created by any municipality, it will contain a beautifully curated listing of historic places in that locale, especially historical structures like theatres, courthouses and mansions featuring sublime architecture. It is the places–typically connected to the town’s most prominent citizens—that make that town or city unique.

My passion as a writer is exploring this connection between people and places. We all live in the same spaces, just at different times. I suffer from the persistent hallucination that sometimes we collide with people from the past, particularly within the walls of iconic places. There is a person behind every stone set in a foundation, brick laid on a wall, and ornamental frieze gracing a façade, and each of those artisans has a story worth telling. So do the people who lived, worked and played key scenes from their lives inside these buildings.

My short story collection, Tales of Buffalo, contains nineteen tales that, in tandem, tell much of the story of the city of Buffalo. I anchor the tales in the late 1980s and early 1990s but weave historical figures that inhabited the same iconic spaces as the protagonists into the fabric of the tales. These include President William McKinley, legendary architects Frank Lloyd Wright and H.H. Richardson, and the inventor of the grain elevator, Joseph Dart.  My collection will transport you to another time and take you on a journey through what was once the eighth largest city in the United States, and still houses one of the most magnificent collections of architectural masterpieces in the entire country, some of which relate to the Pan-American Exposition of 1901.  Buffalo is a largely forgotten city that is in the process of restoring itself to its former grandeur. I hope my readers will choose to embark on this literary journey with me and contribute to a renewed awareness of this uniquely American place.

My second short story collection, George Washington’s Laundry & Other Tales, contains twenty-three whimsical tales that include but are not limited to “American Bullfrog,” “The House That Walked Away,” “The Dolly Parton Door,” “The Man with the Separated Eyes,” “Bob Hope and The Carpeting Guy, “The Appian Way,” “Free Bird,” and “George Washington’s Laundry.”

Like a two-term 17-year locust, I have emerged as a fiction writer after spending over three decades as an immigration lawyer. I helped tens of thousands of immigrants achieve lawful U.S. immigration status. I received many accolades including being included in Best Lawyers of America for a quarter century, winning the Volunteer Lawyer of the Year Award in Cincinnati in 1988, winning Southwest Ohio Immigration Lawyer of the Year in 2014, and being appointed by Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley as Co-Chair of the Education and Talent Retention Committee.

However, as the years marched by, I kept thinking that my original dream was to be an author and that I had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Chicago. As I approached mid-career as a lawyer, I morphed from an attorney who wrote technical articles on immigration topics to one who turned my legal adventures into fictionalized stories. Examples include the book chapter “Tales of an Unnecessary Lawyer” published in the book, Lawyers as Economic Drivers, and “The Death of a Lawyer” and “Solar Powered Lawyer,” by the American Bar Association Journal. I also diversified into literary sports writing and produced such stories as “The Rime of the Ancient Knuckleballer” published in Bleacher Report.

Aside from my daily writing regimen, which now includes work on my first novel, I enjoy taking nature hikes. I also relish watching old movies that have no special effects and enjoying staring at my extensive collection of antiques, particularly Eastlake Victorian furniture and Bradley & Hubbard lamps. I visit historical sites throughout the country and abroad and use my imagination as a time machine to construct alternate realities when the present one is not to my satisfaction.