Bio
Thank you for checking in with me at this website. I’m glad to have a chance to share my poems with you.
I was born in 1943, and have written in episodes throughout my life. There have also been long periods when other work and challenges just took over. I’ve been writing with more focus over the past three years since I fully shifted into retirement.
My family moved to North Danville, Vermont, when I was 9 years old. My sister and two brothers were part of that move. My youngest brother was the first native Vermonter in the family. We started dairy farming steeped in ignorance. We loved the land, but did not thrive as farmers. My father became a minister after our main farmhouse burned, but we continued to own the land, growing Christmas trees to keep the “home farm” productive.
I was a Protestant minister for over 20 years. I have been an activist and organizer (anti-war, civil rights, community housing, food security, recycling). I was a State Senator for 8 years in Vermont, and ran for Governor in 2006. For the last decade of my paid working career I was an energy policy expert and consultant.
I am a lifelong gardener and lover of the world around me. I have two wonderful daughters, and am the grandparent of four amazing grandsons. I live with my wife, Susan Sussman who is my true companion, and has made me a better birder, lover of music, feminist, and friend to myself (and thus, hopefully) to my family and others.
Throughout my life I have found in poetry a place of reflection, investigation, and sometimes, healing. As I prepared for retirement I began to write with more diligence. Now it feels that poetry is the lens through which I see and experience the world.
As you will see in many of my poems, I come from a long tradition of New England Protestantism. I try to articulate what continues to have meaning for me in that tradition while living in a world where governments and religious traditions generally are struggling to help us live here wisely, and where so many voices that have been forced into silence are just beginning to be heard.
Creating (or discovering) these poems has been a response to the invitation life keeps offering. I am astonished how much stays unsaid. Most of it doesn’t need to; some of it absolutely shouldn’t. I don’t presume to say it for you, but poetry does feel like one way I get to share what I hope you will experience as a familiar, or at least in some measure recognizable, experience.
Publications & Awards
My poetry has been published in Crosswinds, Sun Magazine, Ponder Review, Eclectica, Stonecoast Review, Passager, Florida Review - Aquifer, La Presa, Northern Woodlands Magazine, Wordrunner, Sky Island Journal, and Twyckenham Notes.
In 1995, I was awarded the Ralph Nading Hill literary prize, published in Vermont Life Magazine.