| Narrative: |
I was born in Fresno, California in 1951, and my family was always moving because my father worked as a chief of medical administration for the VA. My family --meaning my father, my mother, my sister Kathi, and myself --were forced to accept this continuous displacement and wore it like a second skin.The enormous changes we were subject to affected us, but I enjoyed moving around because I've always had an insatiable curiosity. I wanted to know why this was this and that was that. I watched and noted what I watched. I began to read at 8, and have been a voracious reader ever since and so the idea of "being a writer" was never an abstraction, or a hobby for me, but a metier, a calling, a profession. If you're a real writer you have no choice. My sister and I also had the good fortune to have had parents who were intelligent, educated, sophisticated, and well read.
My father's father was a San Francisco lawyer who read Shakespeare to his children, and took them to see the great German conductor Bruno Walter leading the San Francisco Symphony. My mother's mother, who lived in San Jose, encouraged my mother to become a musician so that she could reconnect with her Old World "Holland Dutch" roots. My mother had an aptitude for music, which she studied at San Jose State University. She became a classical pianist, and later an organist at Saint Michael's Church in Livermore, where we lived after leaving San Jose where my mother, my sister, and I had been staying for some months. My very first job was being my mother's page turner when she practiced her organ part in Saint Michael's choir loft .The view from there was frightening and -- exciting. And somehow I ended up in music, sketching, drawing, and reading at the same time. Everything seemed to happen just like that, and maybe that's why my father called me "a blithe spirit."
The seminal event in my childhood was living in the stunning landscapes of the Livermore Valley, and later Concord. This, coupled with my reading- largely supplied by my father's mother "Mimi" --- of "California- based " books by Helen Hunt Jackson, Ambrose Bierce, and Robert Louis Stevenson reflected how these landscapes actually were when you actually lived inside them. Everything was exciting to me, even the shadowed things I didn't understand and still don't. And so here I was at a young age, in California, then Chicago, then Rome, and back to my native California, which has shaped me almost as much as Manhattan and its dissimilar boroughs. Because once you're captured by two angels whose realms combine the visual, the musical, and the literary arts -- you have to make up your mind. And so when I went to my first college at Loyola in Rogers Park, then Loyola, Rome, and finally Loyola Marymount, I did not hestate to declare myself an English major because books settled that for me. Once you're on your necessary path, there is no going back. |
| Expertise: |
Michael has 45 years of writing experience in the arts as well as writing and performing in several of his pieces for live theatre; film. He is a widely published, poet, and a critic, dramatist, filmmaker, director, and sometime actor. His work has been translated into Arabic; Japanese; Russian, and Spanish. |
