Stories from a man who spent his career making the world a little less terrible, and his evenings making it a little more absurd.

I split my childhood between Berkeley and rural Oklahoma, which is its own kind of origin story. Later I lived in Tunisia, studied in France, and spent two years in Mauritania with the Peace Corps working on guinea-worm eradication alongside the Carter Center¹ — a sentence that still ends most conversations at parties. After that I helped run the first elementary school for the Ba'Aka community in the Central African Republic, then came home and taught at an inner-city elementary school for a while.

True story. I have never once explained guinea worm disease at a dinner party without someone quietly putting their fork down.

Apparently that wasn't enough acronyms, so I went to medical school, picked up a Master's in Health Service Administration, and now work in public health and raise kids in Seattle². Far less exciting on paper. Better coffee, though.

For the record: never wrangled an actual gorilla. Tracked a few, once. The "herded elephants" claim is similarly aspirational.

I've been writing the entire time — less because I'm inspired and more because the stories don't really ask permission first.³ A few of the short pieces have won awards through the Needle in the Hay writing community. Three books have made it all the way to "finished," which I consider a personal record.

This is also the official explanation for why a novel about a sentient prosthetic arm comes in under 150 pages.