About

If you are looking for the short answer of who I am and what I do, I like to write. If you want or need a little more elaboration, I’m an award-winning communicator, writer, blogger and graphic designer who helps people and organizations communicate clearly and effectively. I live in a Mid-Century Modern ranch house on the cool southside of Fort Worth with my lovely wife, Felicia, my charming daughter, Julia, a one-eyed cowdog and a petulant gray cat. If you are just looking for professional stuff, check this. If you want the long answer, keep reading.

I became a writer because I wanted to be a storyteller. My father loved to tell stories, and I still remember hearing him talk about summer fishing trips down the Red River with his father and brother during the Depression or navigating the waters off of North Korea in a one-cylinder engine sampan during his days with an Army intelligence unit. Growing up a Baptist who was in church twice on Sunday and every Wednesday night, I heard lots of stories from the Bible and real-life tales of sin and salvation, which also contributed to my fascination. Of course, I don’t think anyone can become storyteller without being a reader, and browsing the stacks at a library has always been an exciting adventure. The musty scent of old books is still one my favorites.

The craft of writing also fascinated me while growing up. I loved the clack of typewriter keys and remember spending more time than a 12-year-old should hunched over a typewriter. Although typing later took a backseat to scrawling longhand in journals, I still love typewriters and keep two or three around the house even now.

The real lightning bolt for my imagination growing up was discovering punk rock. Growing up in Texas, I always listened to country music, but when I first heard Paul Weller and Joe Strummer, my world changed. I realized there was a lot more to the world than what you see at first glance, and, if you are willing to look for it, there’s a lot out there to discover. I took that punk rock DIY attitude to heart and began living a double-life — at school, I was an honor student and school paper news reporter; after the bell, I published an underground newspaper with the help of a typewriter, a Xerox machine and a few comrades in rabble-rousing who are still good friends to this day.

A month after my 18th birthday, I began working at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the page composition department. Working with an Xacto knife and a pica pole, I was a minor contributor to the obsolete art of building a newspaper by hand. Getting to work with real journalists was quite a thrill, and even though I aspired to be one of them, they all told me the same thing — for the love of Christ go do something else with your life. I fully intended to heed those words as I went to the University of Texas in Austin a little more than a year later. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I believed full-well that I would never be a journalist.

By a complete accident, I fell into the American Studies program and into the hands of some amazing teachers who taught me as much about writing as they did about American culture — Bill Stott, Kurth Sprague, Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Jeff Meikle. Caught up in this academic milieu, I became convinced that I should go to grad school and become some sort of tweedy academic.

Well, as Woody Allen says, if you want to make God laugh, make a plan. Thanks to immediate economic need, in the early 1990s, I found back doing what I told myself I would never do, working as a journalist at the Star-Telegram working in the sports department. I said goodbye to dreams of academia in a flurry of box scores and game stories, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment. Of course, the fact that I met my wife there has absolutely colored my vision. But it turned out to be a great place to learn about life.

One great thing about working in sports is you have to work your ass off and know a little bit of everything — news, business, features, and, occasionally, sports. I had the chance to learn writing, editing, reporting, page design, managing people and the business side of editorial. It was like a Master’s degree that didn’t cost anything other than partial liver function from nights at the bar after work. The other great thing about sports is that no on takes you seriously. Sports is the toy department, and people figure if you work in sports, you must not be very good at what you do. As a result, I’ve always loved being underestimated. It’s fun to surprise people with success.

In 1999, I rode the dot-com boom through a couple of Dallas-based online start-ups that ultimately fizzled but introduced me to the world of online content, as well as some great lifelong friends. I also learned the meaning of the term “burn rate” — the business world’s spin on “publish of perish.” Ultimately, I found my way into internal communications as a consultant, writer, designer and problem solver for large national and global employers. I learned a lot about human resources, human capital, employee communication and workforce issues. I also learned that communication doesn’t mean much if you can see a measurable result from what you are doing.

But even though I was winning awards, I was getting restless with corporate communications that was overwhelmingly print-based. As I found myself becoming more and more frustrated, I started blogging at The Caravan of Dreams in 2005 as an outlet and a learning exercise. I quickly rediscovered my love of free-form, unstructured writing and the DIY sensibility. I also discovered even though blogging provides a great way to connect with people online, it’s also a great way to connect with people right where you live. As I connected with my fellow bloggers around Fort Worth, we discovered that blogging was a great way to build online and offline communities. That’s why together with my friends Kevin Buchanan, Pete Geniella, Bernie Scheffler and Pete Wann, we created West and Clear in 2007.

What I believe people responded to with West and Clear is that five people brought their different perspectives about the world and their city to the discussion. My hope was to try and provide a level of civic discussion and social criticism that other media outlets weren’t providing. You might not agree with us, but you had to read us. An even though comment threads are too-often the domain of ad hominem attacks and ignorance, the comments there almost always raised the level of discourse. In my mind, the readers of West and Clear became the real stars.

And West and Clear quickly became the premier blog in Fort Worth. My colleagues and I did lots of work that I continue to be proud of, and we built connections with people around Fort Worth, Dallas and Texas. Through my work with West and Clear, I had a chance to meet and eventually work with the Starr Tincup guys helping them innovate direct marketing in the human capital software and services industry. These guys are smart mofos, and I love working with them.

However, nothing good lasts forever. Endless 80-plus-hour weeks between work and blogging began to take their toll. In May 2009, we decided top call it quits at West and Clear. But I still love telling stories and that is what I want to continue doing with this site. I hope you’ll find something interesting to read here and keep coming back even if a few days or weeks goes by between posts.