About

Hello and welcome.

I have the great fortune to sit on both sides of the desk as writer and editor/publisher. This website focuses on my work as an author. My next book concerns my preoccupation with Jean Cocteau. Ever since I stumbled across his work in 1983, at the impressionable age of twenty-two, he has accompanied me on this jagged journey through life. The gist of the book is this:

By looking at the life of the poet, novelist, artist, filmmaker, choreographer, enfant terrible, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), his profound and lasting influence on modern art in many of its forms, his difficult but lived-out-loud relationship with his sexuality and the paradox of his public persona, I’m exploring how lives past create a palimpsest over which we layer our own. Rather than effacing these past lives, we build upon them. The result is an enrichment of both ours and theirs, an incarnate memorial planted in our hearts and minds, and one that animates our lived experience. This celebration of someone whose life crosses the time-space continuum to touch our own can be as powerful as those we live among. In my adult lifelong experience, Cocteau has been my intimate. Born of another time, place, and milieu entirely, he lives in my heart alongside my closest friends and family and is cherished as intensely. He doesn’t have a clue about my life and that’s okay. Cocteau, however, was prescient—or perhaps just cosmically dogged—as his parting words, engraved on his stone crypt in a restored 12^thcentury basilica outside of Paris in Milly-la-forêt: Je reste avec vous, or “I stay with you.” His words, for me, are truer than true.

This new book is a hybrid memoir/bio—I’m not really sure what to call it—about Cocteau, about some crazy shit in my own life and about the ways in which Cocteau has been my longest-lasting love affair.