About

I was born in Rantoul, Illinois in 1958. We moved to Albert Lea, Minnesota shortly before my 5th birthday. After graduating from high school, I went on to earn my B.A. at St John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota and M.A. at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, both in English. After graduate school, I lived 20 years in Minneapolis. I have now lived for 25 years in Chicago. I live in the Andersonville neighborhood with my wife and our teenaged son.

I am descended from families that have lived in Illinois for 200 years. My earliest ancestors in America arrived in Virginia in the 1650s. My immediate ancestors, the Herwig’s, arrived in Illinois in 1850. Since the 17th century all my direct ancestors, including my grandparents and parents, have been rural people either farmers or living in small towns.

Though The Long Way Home is my first published book, I have been a writer, performer, teacher, and student of literature and the humanities for all my adult life. Most important to me was the period in which I was a performance artist. As a performing artist, I was interested in how a poet or writer transforms an image into metaphor. I imagined a physical space or moment of time between the formation of a metaphor and when a writer or poet writes it down on a piece of paper or taps it out on a keyboard. I wanted to emote for an audience the first words of discovery.

It is in this spirit that I wrote The Long Way Home. I have tried to imagine the present moment using the power of discovery to invite the reader into the same experience. Wherever possible, I’ve used context to inform each image with meaning rather than explaining its importance. My hope is that this approach will help the reader to not only imagine and understand my experience but also to imagine themselves undergoing a similar experience of self-discovery.

I also worked for many years in the social/economic justice field of community development. In that time, I worked both for a bank and a federal regulatory agency. Community development largely came about because of the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977. It is the last major piece of federal civil rights legislation. Through it, the federal government monitors the extent to which banks provide access to financial services for low- and moderate-income people and low- and moderate-income communities. Because of the historic correlation between race and poverty in America, this has meant working primarily in communities of color. In my final years, I worked on community development in economically distressed communities in the rural Midwest.