About
I've been telling stories my whole life. It started before I knew it was a skill. Both my parents worked in TV news. My mom owned a video production company for two decades. Stories were the family business. I eventually realized I'd inherited that gene.
It started on the sports desk at seventeen
I was seventeen when the Kalamazoo Gazette ran my first article. For the next decade I covered everything from high school volleyball to the NHL, which is its own education in finding the human in a story and finding it before deadline. Then I traded the press box for corporate communications.
The 'no thank you' that became ten years
Three years into a global communications role at Kellogg, my wife and I moved to Charlotte. The company eventually wanted me back in Michigan. I said no thank you, we agreed on freelance instead, and they have been a client ever since. Those same relationships led me to Wendy's, where I wrote the '50 Stories for 50 Years' anniversary book and interviewed the man who invented the Frosty. Square hamburgers, for the record.
The turn to color
In 2015 an artist friend talked me into trying chalk pastel. I fell for it immediately and started giving pieces to friends and family, just to see them land. The ones that matter most still hang in homes and offices I get to visit, including a sixteenth-floor wall in Uptown Charlotte. Book or canvas, the job has never changed: make something a person wants to keep.