It’s been what you might call a zig-zag path

My professional life didn’t follow the conventional course, where the goal was to land on a major metropolitan daily. If not the New York Times, then the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, or the down the line from there. What were also called “destination” newspapers, with decent pay and more focused work in contrast to the sweatshops in smaller communities, or what are now called markets.

I had some near misses, but my route instead led me into places that remain largely unexplored, at least as far as literature or public awareness are concerned.

In my case?

• Binghamton, New York, along the Susquehanna River and the Southern Tier of the Allegheny foothills. What I encountered there appears in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks and, with a heavy New York City connection, Subway Visions.
• The Poconos of Pennsylvania, when I took off for a few years in a monastic setting based on yoga practice and back-to-the-earth community. This is the foundation of Yoga Bootcamp as well as portions of Subway Visions.
• Fostoria, a railroad crossing in the flat but very fertile farmland of northwest Ohio. Gives rise to Prairie Depot in Nearly Canaan and to the opening novella in the Secret Side of Jaya. And, personally, the bride in my first marriage.
• Back to Bloomington, this time not as a student but as a public policy research associate make that social sciences editor at Indiana University. My experiences as an undergraduate frame Daffodil  Uprising and What’s Left, while those as college staff feed into Nearly Canaan and the middle novella of the Secret Side of Jaya, both extrapolated to the Ozarks in Arkansas.
• Yakima, Washington. It’s the Promised Land in Nearly Canaan and the final novella in the Secret Side of Jaya.
• Dubuque, Iowa, along the Upper Mississippi. Adds some detail to Daffodil and What’s Left. Personally and professionally, it was a disaster.
• Warren, Ohio, in the Rust Belt. Hometown News. And how!
• Baltimore, Maryland, my base as a field representative for the Chicago Tribune’s media syndicate. More detail for Hometown News.
• Manchester, New Hampshire, and later commuting from Dover an hour to the east. Revisions to the manuscripts and earlier versions.
• And now, Eastport, Maine, in supposed retirement.

Curiously, my professional locations before Baltimore all infuse my fiction. Strangely, I’ve never written about Dayton, where I grew up, or the places later, at least as fiction. Poetry is another matter altogether.