About Me

I lived in China from 2003-2016 in Chongqing, Beijing, Xi’an, and Xining with my wife of twentysome years and our half-dozen kids. (Well, it was only two when we moved there!) I speak fluent (whatever that means) Mandarin and precious little Norwegian, Spanish, Thai, or French anymore because of it. I enjoy relaxing, reading, cooking (sometimes), journaling, pondering, and (over?)-analyzing, and I deeply miss golf, owning a motorcycle, and long road trips.

I wildly prefer editing to creating, have been known to floor my children with my coloring skills (yes, crayons), and hope I get the chance to visit twenty more countries. I like mountains, shorelines, forests, and thunderheads, and am thankful, now that I’m back in the US, for blue sky, clean air, and stargazing.

I get my kicks from witty humor, learning, and overusing parentheses. I love my family, my wife the most, and Jesus more.

I have worked as a behavioral-disorder school TA and a YMCA after-school program head teacher in Chicago; as an ESL teacher in Taipei; as a middle/high school English/math teacher, real estate investor, and youth director in Texas; as a grad student and Ace Paint Man in New York; and as a technical consultant, accountant, and general manager of a coffee shop and language center in China. I enjoyed it all, in a passionless sort of way, as it wasn’t half the glamorous life it may sound like.

I have spoken publicly wherever I’ve gone, but then, really doesn’t everyone? I also toiled for years under the weight of a doctoral-program impasse resulting from an inflexible, underage advisor who never granted the Candy Landoctorate that was surely earned multiple times over. During those same decades I had always personally hoped to stumble on something that felt like doing what I was born to do, but had come to concede by 40 that maybe such dreams don’t come to everyone. Only to have joy in work––my heart’s desire––bowl me over as I wrote my first book. Since then, life as we knew it has come to an end, and our family no longer lives in China. We continue to love, worship, and serve Jesus, whose current calling on our life is pastoral work in the Atlanta area.