About the Author

I’m a writer, financial advisor, and longtime Quaker pastor.

For more than twenty-five years, I’ve had the privilege of walking alongside people through some of the ordinary and extraordinary moments of their lives—beginnings and endings, grief and celebration, questions of faith, identity, family, and what comes next.

Those same questions tend to find their way into my writing.

My first book, Searching for James Gibson: Unraveling a Two-century-old Family Legend, grew from a family story and a genealogical search that eventually led me through eighteenth-century Boston, Barbados, the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg, and a mystery that had survived for generations.

Conversations with Bridget: A Liminal Summer is a very different kind of book. Inspired by real events, it explores a summer of transition and the strange, funny, sometimes uncomfortable conversations that can happen when one life is ending and another has not quite begun.

I’m continuing to work on stories drawn from history, memory, faith, and place.

I hold a bachelor’s degree from Minnesota State University Moorhead and graduate degrees in theology from the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. When I’m not writing, working, or preparing for Sunday morning, I’m likely to be reading history, researching someone who has been dead for several centuries, listening to diverse genres of music, or wandering through the woods with binoculars keeping an eye out for birds. I enjoy hiking and canoeing, particularly in the swamps, forests, and waterways of Virginia and North Carolina.

I live in southeastern Virginia with my wife, Donna. Between us, we have four children and one grandchild.