“Writing is the undernourished waif with the sickly pallor and coal-smudged cheeks who tugged at the hem of my greatcoat while I set about doing more important things:  playing the piano, taking photographs and consorting with all the wrong people...”

So I recount in the Preface to my recently published collection of humorous personal essays and off-the-wall political satire. Those “more important things” at least provided the fodder for a lot of ink on paper and pixels on screens.

Starting with a disgruntled childhood in small-town Ontario, I was thrown into the fray of city life when we moved to Toronto just in time to enjoy the honor of "only gay teen at high school" and where "concert pianist" topped my mother's list of required achievements. Thence to London, England, ostensibly to continue my musical studies, and where I took to the stage in a flurry of one-man shows and "alternative" theatre roles, which sounds better than "appeared in dubious first drafts of one-act plays for no money for audiences of one." I returned to Canada, happier and no wiser, in 1990.  

And throughout all of this: writing.

I've written plays, poetry and short stories, but I truly hit my stride and found my voice with my blog “A Slow, Painful Death Would Be Too Good for You (and Other Observations),” which provided the literary equivalent of sourdough starter, as well as the title, for my book.

It's the perfect collection for adult readers who are pining for light-hearted, bittersweet short-form writing that's snarky yet lovable; awkwardly inappropriate yet disarmingly forgivable; full of typically male opinionated bluster but still craving constant validation; shocking but still suitable for gifting your mom, if your mom works as a burlesque dancer; and openly queer yet able to “pass” when it suits The Gay Agenda.  

And let's cut to the chase, here: If you need something to read at the beach, my book clocks in at three hundred and seventy-one pages and does less damage than "Moby Dick" when you fall asleep and drop it on your face.  This is not a small thing.

I've been a voracious reader all my life, and writers in a humorous style whom I've swallowed whole include: Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, James Kirkby, Stephen Leacock, Stephen McCauley, Dr. Seuss, Evelyn Waugh, and, more recently, Edward St. Aubyn (“The Patrick Melrose Novels”). I nearly forgot to include Fran Lebowitz, the doyenne of LGBT literary-grump humor; and I must also call out, as idol and model, the incomparable raconteur David Sedaris, whose surname is, weirdly, the exact anagram of mine if you change all the vowels to “o” and “i” until you have enough, add an extra "d" then ignore anything left over that doesn't fit.  Made-up truth— truly stranger than fiction!

I live, at the moment entirely free from domestic animals, in Toronto, Canada.