It’s hard to know what to share in a a space like this. I’m a native New Yorker, bumped around a lot through my early years — Kentucky, Connecticut, New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, more or less in that order —before landing in New Hampshire, where I’ve lived the last twenty-plus years.
My writing life came about, almost by accident, when, in the summer of 1969, I spent five weeks in the home of a West Virginia coal miner and his family, and wrote a story about the experience that wound up as a feature in the Sunday magazine section of the Louisville Courier-Journal in the spring of 1970 — my first by-line.
The next eight years, looking back on them, seem almost a blur. I moved to Boston, later back to New York, then to Connecticut, then New Jersey—where I freelanced furiously, almost indiscriminately, for any outlet that would pay me for my work: the old Boston Phoenix, Boston Magazine, Connecticut Magazine, The Village Voice, New Jersey Monthly, the Christian Science Monitor, several others. Many of these stories were profiles: of politicians, athletes, activists, the homeless. For three years, I worked for a small Connecticut daily, The Bristol Press, first as a reporter, later as columnist and political editor. Midway through this time, I was married, had a son, and was divorced — in far too rapid succession.
In 1978, in what I recognize today as, at least in part, a bid to anchor myself, I took over as editor-publisher of an investigative weekly in Atlantic City — it was the first year of casino gambling, and the investigative opportunities seemed limitless. They were indeed, and over the ensuing eight years we published some life-changing stories and won many awards, but in the end the fight for ad dollars was too much and the paper failed to survive.
In 1992 I connected with my first book: Class, a family memoir, published by Henry Holt. Four more books followed: Dead Opposite: The Lives and Loss of Two American Boys (Holt, 1994), which grew out of the murder of a Yale student; The Game of Their Lives (Holt, 1996, Harper Collins. 2005 ), an account of the U.S. upset in the 1950 World Cup and the immigrant men behind it, adapted for a 2005 movie; The Classmates (Hyperion/Hachette, 2008), a quasi-memoir that tracks the lives of six high-school classmates, including myself, in the years following the Vietnam War; and finally The Grifter, The Poet and The Runaway Train (Globe Pequot, 2019), a collection of stories written since the mid-nineties for Yankee Magazine.
Over the years, I’ve also done quite a lot of teaching, mostly as an adjunct at UMass Lowell but also at Bread Loaf, several school and college residencies and at The Writers Center in eastern Vermont, just across the border from New Hampshire, where I live these days alongside the Connecticut River with my wife of fourteen years.