About

A good story should take you places. And once there, it should introduce you to characters that were sculpted with patience and with care.

I think a story should take us much further though; it should put us in the head and in the heart of a character and that place should be vaster than the world in which it exists. And infinitely vaster than the one we were just yanked from.

I was born in Chile in 1966 and exiled in 74. With only hazy memories of military terror, I was raised in the Netherlands and in the United States.

As a teenager in Texas, in the mid-eighties, I begin to write and to compose songs and I start to become aware of what I pretentiously once called, ‘the music in words.’

As far as education, I quit college in 1990.

I will not preach how I believe travel is infinitely more valuable than years spent listening to college professors. Although, surely, knowledge does get passed along better when we force ourselves to sit tight and shut our traps so we can listen to people who are wiser than we are. But travel is how we learn about ourselves, more so than sitting in class. That’s how I felt then and still do.

In my sophomore year I held a flame to a stack of traffic violations I had collected over the course of some months, dumped my ’86 Pontiac at the front door of my soon-to-be former employer’s, packed up my electric guitar and my hard cover copy of The Tropic of Cancer and set off to Europe without much of a plan.

What follows is almost a decade unaccounted for in my Curriculum Vitae. But which, according to some sources, was spent mostly on park benches and the Amsterdam band scene. There was poetry and song writing and there was also the discovery of narrative fiction. The latter being little more than a distraction at this point from fruitless endeavours in both music and later television, after my re-emergence around the closing of the twentieth century.
Little doubt that my background has colored and shaped my writing, as my characters are – as should all fictional characters – always be in the processes of transforming in some way. It isn’t my place to analyse but I do recognise in my characters a

disillusionment and a social detachment that is so typical of all modern migrants and which too often reveals itself as unabated ridicule without an apology.