I was born and raised in Spooner, Wisconsin, a small town in the northern part of the state. After earning my bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire and the University of Tennessee respectively, I served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, was active in Wisconsin politics for several years, and served in various administrative capacities in Wisconsin's human services system in both the private and the public sector. My first published work, The Taos Massacres, is a well-regarded historical novel dealing with the rebellion of Mexicans and Indians against American authority in 1847 in the aftermath of the Mexico-American War. It was published through Puzzlebox Press, which I established to get my work before the reading public. During that process, I discovered how much I enjoy creating a ready-to-print book and cover. Some writers use history as a departure point, and basically create a story. I stick as close as I can to what we consider to be historical fact, and try to make the history interesting. However, I feel free to create (or to re-create) in what I call the "interstices of history," where events are connected, but we do not know how they are connected, or characters are mentioned, but we know little about them. My second book is The Odyssey of Mary B, another well-received historical novel that follows a young convict woman sent to Australia in the First Fleet. She later escaped and was returned to England, where James Boswell of biography fame took up her cause. My third book is a memoir titled Behind Enemy Lines, which tells of my childhood polio and its effect on my early life. Readers admire the memoir's honesty and its rich detail about small town life in northern Wisconsin. The Boys: 1st North Dakota Volunteers in the Philippines grew out of my interest in making my grandfather's unpublished narrative of his service with the Volunteers more accessible and understandable to younger readers. It is my first, purely historical work. It is a comprehensive history of the early days of the war in the Philippines, and I am happy to see that it has garnered good reviews. In working on The Boys, I compiled extensive information on an elite military unit that earned great praise for its derring-do. I turned that information into a monograph I published on Kindle, Young's Scouts: A Complete History. I recently edited and published a memoir written by a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, A Wedding in Samar, by John Halloran. I think it is an honest, rich, and unique work that deserves publication, even posthumously. I recently published Tom Stafne, a Volunteer Soldier in the Philippines. Tom was my grandfather, and I have long wanted to make the narrative he left of his service in the 1st North Dakota regiment more accessible to his descendants. I am unmarried, live in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, and have one surviving son, and three grandchildren.