Born in 1949 to French-Canadians, I grew up in a middle-class factory town in central Massachusetts.  Educated in its public schools, and also by the Catholic Church, I graduated in 1967, a B-student and the best shot in the pool hall.  Attending the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for two years, I majored in various introductory courses, with a minor in psychedelics, then I dropped out to study photography in Toronto and New York City, and also took up the guitar and harmonica and began to write songs.

In my early twenties, influenced by Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan, I wandered America—a day or a week here, a month or two there—singing in New Orleans, Boston, Northampton, Cape Cod, Key West—financed mainly by seasonal work in carnival games. 

Quitting the midway in 1976, I took my songs to New York City, and soon realized I was wasting my breath.  My creative interests shifted from song to prose, and I began to read—novels, criticism, psychology, religion, the occult—two dozen books at a time from the New York Public Library and used bookstores.  The next summer, I returned to my hometown, self-analyzed my neuroses, and was reborn a pantheist.

A year later, lugging a suitcase heavy with books and a duffle bag stuffed with the rest of all I had, I went south again, to Savannah, Key West, and eventually St.Thomas, U.S.Virgin Islands, where I went to work for a sandal maker—and once took a night course on writing, taught by Derek Walcott.  When I returned to the continent a few years later, with several thousand dollars saved, Diana came too, soon pregnant with our first child.

I opened a sandal shop in Lake Worth, Florida—where Amalia was born in 1981.  It was about this time that I got the idea for Appalachian Carnival and began to tinker with it.  When my sandal shop fizzled, we flew back to St.Thomas and my old job.  A year or so later, we were on the mainland again, pregnant again, and jobless in Reagan’s recession. 

Necessity being the mother of invention, I designed my own line of shoes, and in 1983 we moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, to set up shop and give birth to Eliza.  My shoes were a hit with alternative types.  I sold them retail at art & craft fairs and wholesale to college-town stores.  In ‘85, we moved back to Massachusetts, where I built up my wholesale trade and worked retail shows on the East Coast from Maryland to Vermont.

The next year, wanting to buy a home, we moved near Diana’s family in Michigan, where real-estate prices were at rock-bottom.  Six months later, Diana left me.  To be near my kids, I stayed on, bought a house in Benzonia, and put my business in a barn behind it.  Off and on during this time, I’d fire up the novel on a back burner and cook up a few new pages.

In the nineties, after selling my wholesale business to a start-up that I put together in upstate New York, I shifted my trade to custom shoemaking.  I married Gale and became step dad for two young daughters.  I renovated my century-old house.  I expanded my workshop and hired employees.  And one winter month, I sat down to see if I could make some headway in the novel—which I did, easily writing fifty pages or so, and much enjoying it.  Though having scarce hours for it then, I knew that one day, after selling my retail business, I’d take the time to sit down and write a book.

At the millennium, after Gale and I divorced, I started up a band with my buddies, performing Cajun music.  Within a few years, I was onstage at music festivals in Michigan, singing Southwest-Louisiana standards, in French.  I met the lady I’m now with, Susan, and after I sold the shoe shop in 2006, we spent a few springs in the South of France, where I sat down one month with my new laptop and wrote a thousand words a day.  Back in the States, I found that if I got out of town, I’d get more writing done, so twice I rented sublets in Northampton and finished the first draft in about five months. 

A dozen rewrites later, I’ve honed my skills—aided by a shelf of how-to books—and I now believe my book is ready to be read.  I did give an early draft to several people, from whom I received good responses—as well as criticism I’ve heeded, thus making appropriate changes.

With my house for sale, and with good physical and financial health, I now spend summers in Northern Michigan and winters in St.Petersburg, Florida—quite free to go on the road and sell books.