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In 2006, my father, facing open-heart surgery in Italy, asked me to keep him company. Those two weeks were the first time we'd been one-on-one, man to man as it were, without the distractions of spouses or children. We built a new relationship. I got much better acquainted with Trieste, his home town, and, while exploring it with him, uncovered a fascinating set of family stories and a few mysteries. I decided to have some literary fun, inventing the answers to those mysteries and setting the stories against the backdrop of what Lonely Planet has dubbed one of Earth's best undiscovered places. My father has since passed what he described as "the final test," but not before allowing himself to be mildly entertained by some of my inventions.
Author Bio
I was born in Philadelphia and at 4 months was whisked across the Atlantic, spending the first half of my childhood in Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland. My family moved back to Philly when I was ten, then to the San Francisco Bay Area two years later. I won admittance to Stanford where I majored in International Relations, finally learned Italian, and became a reporter at The Stanford Daily.
After graduation, I became the Palo Alto Weekly's first reporter, moved to Texas to work for the Abilene Reporter-News, then to Santa Fe where I reported for The Albuquerque Journal. After three years in daily newspapers, I decided to go to graduate school and earned my MBA at Stanford, where I was publisher of the business school's newspaper. I started my business career at Frito-Lay, back in Texas, then moved to Seattle where I applied my marketing and strategic planning skills in a variety of companies ranging from startups to big names like Eddie Bauer and Microsoft.
A family tragedy changed my priorities and I got back into writing, eventually turning to fiction, largely inspired by a desire to solve mysteries in my family's history. One set of mysteries revolved around my father's upbringing in Trieste, Italy. I visited him there many times before he passed away, gaining a much better appreciation of him and falling in love with that fascinating multi-cultural and too-often war-torn region. My hope is that my stories can provoke questions and introspection as well as a curiosity about Trieste.
These days I live on an island in Puget Sound with my wife and our cat. When I'm not reading or writing, I swim, row or head for the North Cascades or Olympic mountain ranges for hiking, backpacking or skiing adventures.