I was born in 1956.  My father was in the US Air Force and our family moved often, living in Florida, Virginia, Montana and Tennessee, in addition to three years in Germany.

After being exposed to horror movies at an early age, I became fascinated with authors like Poe, Bierce and Lovecraft -- masters of fear who seemed to know about the supernatural.  

I was writing my own fan fiction by the age of 14.  At 16, I started my own fanzine, Ambrosia (two issues were published in 1972-3, reprinted 1997); contributors included Robert Bloch (author of Psycho), Tim Kirk, Harry O. Morris, Denis Tiani and Richard Tierney.

          I attended McGavock High School in Nashville, Tennessee.  I won the Tennessee High School Chess Championship in 1973.    In my senior year, I was literary editor for the school paper.
                    My early weird writings were published in Ambrosia, Arkham Sampler, Eldritch Tales, Etchings and Odysseys, From Beyond the Dark Gateway, and Nyctalops.  My surrealist poem “Painting One: Dreamscape” won first place for poetry in Belmont’s contest for Nashville high schools in 1973.

          I attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, enrolling in the College Scholars Program, which allowed me to design my own curriculum.  My focus was Comparative Philosophy and Religious Studies, with minors in English and music.  My thesis centered on Jiddu Krishnamurti, with comparisons to Advaita and Zen.   In 1979, I won the Margaret Artley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing.  In my senior year, I was the poetry editor of the school’s literary-arts magazine, The Phoenix (Fall and Winter, 1979).  I earned a B.A. in 1980.            
          In 1990 I married Julie Hodge, an artist and musician from Eugene, OR.  We have lived in San Francisco, Oakland, and Eureka, CA.

          In 1996, I launched a website with pages devoted to the lives and works of my favorite authors, mainly in the “genres” of supernatural horror, absurdism, and surrealist writing -- at a time when information on them was scarce on the internet.  Lesser-known authors including Witold Gombrowicz, Anna Kavan and M. P. Shiel were featured.  It remained online for 25 years, until 2021.

          Beginning in 1998, I assisted Donald Sidney-Fryer in preparing a dozen of his books for publication, beginning with the second series of Songs and Sonnets Atlantean and including the five-volume, million-word ballet study The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe (Phosphor Lantern Press, 2018; revised 2021).  My tribute website, The Last of the Courtly Poets, is at this domain.
                    Keith Allan Daniels’ Anamnesis Press published my poetry chapbook From a Safe Distance in 2000, after it earned Honorable Mention in their annual contest. 

          New weird work and reprints were published in Al Azif, Cthulhu Codex, Spectral Realms, Studies in Weird Fiction, and Yawning Vortex.  In 2012, Hippocampus Press published Intimations of Unreality, collecting my early Lovecraftian tales together with several new ones, my fantasy poetry, and two fantasy novellas that represent my more original work.  In 2015, I collaborated with John Thomas Allen on a book of surrealist poetry, The Lighthouse Above the Graveyard (Dark Green Sun Press, 2016).

          From 2017-2020 I published a series of five collections of poetry and fiction under the imprint of translucent books, most recently The Elephant in the Room and Others (2020).  A new book of poetry, Footnotes to the Obvious, will be published on August 1, 2023.

          Now retired, I worked at various jobs over the years, ranging from janitor to application developer.

About

Subscribe to My Mailing List

Thank you!

Error