About Me

Always trying to find the humorous, the ironic, even the perverse, I came to fiction late — after a long career in the law. My law career began more than fifty years ago with my defense of an accused prisoner in the then-notorious San Quentin Six case and eventually evolved into my certification by the State of California as a Family Law Specialist, which is to say I initially watched the worst people at their best and then the best people at their worst. Among the writers I have sought to emulate are Anton Chekhov, Anthony Marra, and Joan Didion.

I did my undergraduate work at UCLA — in my beloved City of the Angels — and then moved north to San Francisco for law school at UC Hastings. In 2010 I was awarded a master’s degree in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I have lived in Marin County for most of my adult life, the last almost thirty years with my wonderful wife, Svetlana.

Many of my stories draw on my experience with places and people I’ve actually known. For example, Tom & Leone is a fictionalized account of my grandparents’ lives in rural Arkansas a century ago, describing Tom, my one-armed grandfather, Leone, my mentally challenged grandmother, and the four sons, including my father, who somehow managed to grow up, leave Arkansas and create normal lives for themselves.

I speak Russian, and before Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, visited most of Russia’s major cities.