I had great successes with writing in the fifth grade, receiving (familial) acclaim for a poem about my dad’s leather jacket and a short story about a boy blinded by the eclipsed sun who becomes reliant on an unwanted seeing-eye dog. Heady stuff. I’ve been trying to duplicate those efforts for the past twenty-five years. I live in Chicago with my wife and son and soon-to-be-here second son and write fiction and blog posts (www.eightoneeightseven.com) in between surgeries, which I’m a part of during the day when doctors use equipment my company makes to give people new knees and new hips. I’m also the co-founder of Aporia|Chicago (www.aporiachicago.com), which publishes originally written literary greeting cards.

In one way, I believe that it’s easy to be a writer–you, simply, do it; you write. However, to fully realize myself as a writer–as someone communicating–I need to have something to say, something to bring to my audience, something to answer the question, “So what?” This aspect doesn’t involve the ever-attention to improving my craft but, excitingly, requires reflection, insight which self-ascribes value and meaning to my work, making it a more genuine extension of myself. And sometimes I start with a small piece of intention and, through the process of writing, figure out more clearly, more earnestly, what that motivation, what that conviction is. The exploration, the unfurling is one of the things I most love about writing.