Toronto, Canada / Lake Chapala, Mexico
Fiction
with Sheree Renée Thomas
I am from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My mom is an artist from Brooklyn. My dad is a retired photographer who studied at Pratt, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Adolescence happened in Toronto, where we moved in the 80s, and Montréal, where I went to university. I was a working actor in my teens, then a student of carbon science, years later, during my master’s at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Forestry. In between it all, I’ve tended to write magic realism fiction. In Montréal, while studying creative writing, film and art history for my undergrad degree, I was reading Chekhov, Jim Carroll, Ferlinghetti, Tristan Tzara… and into Italian neorealist cinema. I adapted some of my short fiction into screenplays, capriciously dreaming of a life in screenwriting. But hastily abandoned the endeavor to go to graduate school. At a point, perhaps my life was on a trajectory to becoming a full-time writer. But a few characters and detours led to my involvement developing renewable carbon, and years renovating a hacienda on a lake south of Guadalajara. I found UTV so that I might ignore my relentless imagination a little less, and continue a work of magic realism, based on bits of history, that relates to the ancestral home of my family; Kyivan Rus.