Welcome
I was born in Spokane, Washington and graduated from Gonzaga Preparatory High School, where I played varsity football, ran track, and participated in theatre, debate, glee club, and elocution; Gonzaga University (Bachelor of Arts), where I boarded in my junior year with an Italian student in Florence, Italy and majored in Comparative Literature; and Harvard Law School (Juris Doctor). Since graduation from law school, I have worked for the Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), as a King County deputy prosecuting attorney and as a partner in several Seattle law firms.
I have discovered that story telling is a welcome antidote to the practice of law. And I am a glutton for stories, whether found in books, the daily newspaper, newscasts, podcasts, film, eavesdropping on a conversation, around a campfire or live on stage. I am a believer in what Arthur Miller called "the tragedy of the common man . . . where we are in the presence of a character (like his Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman) who is ready to lay down his or her life, if need be, to secure his or her sense of personal dignity."
My appetite for story started by reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in high school and has continued to be nourished by contemporary story tellers such as Amor Towles's Gentleman in Moscow, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, and, in no particular order also stories by John Updike, Tony Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Russell Banks, Dorothy Allison, Ethan Canin, Ann Lamott, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, Sherman Alexie, Phillip Roth, Scott Turow, Stephen King, Khaled Hosseini, Ayad Ahktar, Amy Stewart, Ivan Doig, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain and many others. All of these writers took me to places I'd never been.
I am a member and supporter of the Seattle Rep Theater (formerly Chair of the Board), Author's Guild, Dramatists Guild, Doctors Without Borders, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, NPR, Black Lives Matter, Project Pilgrimage, Common Purpose, NAACP, NAAM, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Shakespeare, ACT, and the Williams Project.