I spent thirty years as an English teacher and school principal. I have another thirty years on top of that as a blogger, editor, and freelance writer, which tells you something about how little sleep I have actually gotten in my life.

I retired from the world of formal education in July of 2022, packed up a career in Toronto, and moved out to Newfoundland with my wife to finally find some quiet. I got the quiet, but I did not expect what else came with it.

In 2023, not long after I thought the hard part of my life was behind me, I was diagnosed with cancer. Since that first diagnosis, I have been hit with 2 more. I am a survivor for now, though I tend to think of myself less as someone who beat something and more as someone who is still in the fight, one day at a time.

The experience did what these things tend to do. It stripped away my patience for anything that did not actually matter and left me with a fairly short list of things that do.

I am also, somewhere in all of this, a man who has had his own reckoning with a bottle, which I have written about plainly as I have little interest in dressing it up.

I do not think there is any use pretending that retirement and illness automatically make a person into someone better. Sometimes they just uncover what was always underneath, and you are left deciding what to do with it.

These days I write almost exclusively under Infinite Impulse, and I have a book, CACHED, coming in the autumn of 2026, which has taken up a fair amount of my time these days. I still review books when something crosses my desk from a writer I support and respect. I still read every night, the way I have for most of my life, because there is nothing that settles me quite the way a good book does.

My interests, if you want the short version, are animals, kindness, writing, and reading.

I would add quiet to that list now too, though it took me the better part of sixty years and a cancer diagnosis to actually go looking for it.

I want to live on a kinder planet, one where people are treated with the respect they are owed simply for being here.

I am not naive enough to think one man writing from a desk in Newfoundland is going to bring that about. But I have found that writing honestly about my own stumbling toward it is about the only contribution I know how to make, so that is what I intend to keep doing.