If you're looking for a highly skilled, trained and experienced professional massage therapist, I recommend my friend Erin. Here's her website.

Here's me on a hike in the Allegheny National Forest. (The glasses are gone now -- laser surgery.)

Here's some of my poems. Most of these have been published somewhere or another.

I'm a member of the Squirrel Hill poetry workshop.

First in November 2000 and twice since, I've been lucky enough to escape the office for a four-week stretch at the Vermont Studio Center, an artist/writer's retreat in Johnson, Vermont. Many of the poems I'm most pleased to have written (most of which aren't yet published) came forth during my stays here. I've made a few lasting friends, and had the chance to get to know several of the visiting poets who spent time there, including Stephen Dunn, Carl Dennis, Dean Young and Robert Wrigley. It's a great place (meditation, yoga, great food) run by artists for artists.

Here's "The Bear," a well known poem by Galway Kinnell, a master among living poets, now in his 70s and writing more beautifully, perhaps, than ever. I studied with him during his term as visiting professor at Pitt in the mid-80s, and again recently, June '98, at a weeklong "new poems" workshop at The Omega Institute, in the Hudson valley north of NYC. Words can't describe how wonder-full this workshop was. Nor for that matter can words do justice to Omega -- a remarkable haven of wisdom, healing and peace. Kinnell wrote "The Bear" in the 1960s, seldom reads it these days, and to hear him perform this poem at Omega was an experience.

Nail that Catfish to a Tree: Rethinking Square Dancing, my essay about square & contra dancing, which is how I often spend Friday evening. From In Pittsburgh, Feb. 20, 1997.

My essay in remembrance of Allen Ginsberg, (1926 - 1997), from In Pittsburgh, April 17, 1997.

Book reviews I wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Strong is Your Hold, by Galway Kinnell (April 1, 2007).
District and Circle, by Seamus Heaney (Oct. 8, 2006).
What Narcissism Means to Me, by Tony Hoagland (Jan. 11, 2004).
Practical Gods, by Carl Dennis (May 23, 2002).
Different Hours, by Stephen Dunn (July 8, 2001).
Blood, Tin, Straw, by Sharon Olds (May 14, 2000).
Bodies That Hum, by Beth Gylys (Aug. 15, 1999).
The Door Open to the Fire, by Judith Vollmer (April 18, 1999).

Here's my Walt Whitman page, a collection of links to Walt Whitman sites on the web. Not up to date, will get to this eventually; maybe in this lifetime.

Save Pittsburgh Public TV. Since summer 1996, I've been active in the effort to stop WQED, our local PBS station, first, from transferring the license of its sister channel, WQEX, to a religious-right, fundamentalist broadcaster. And second, from commercializing the license -- which is a public asset, analogous to a park -- to sell it outright. This has been an energy-consuming fight, with litigation at the FCC. I've written frequently about it -- in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The New People, newspaper of The Thomas Merton Center. Here's our web site, with links to much of the media coverage.

Online brochure of the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Centers. This is a project -- a big one -- I did as a freelancer, writing and editing, rounding up graphics and consulting on design. I worked with people at Brandegee Inc., a top flight communications/design agency who have wonderful office space in an old warehouse on Pittsburgh's Southside. After we finished the hardcopy version and had it printed, I did this WWW version. There's some incredible, eye-grabbing collage graphics in this brochure, created by folks at Brandegee. Too bad the link is no longer active.

My resumé

Send me some e-mail.

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