Yes, from an early age I was drawn to language, books, and the rhythms of storytelling. I wrote poetry as a boy and was reading Dickens, Eliot, and Blake before I fully understood them. I didn’t think of it as a “career” in a conventional sense, but I always sensed that writing and history, would be my lifelong companions. It was never a question of if, but how.
Many readers might not realize how deeply interpretative history writing is. It’s not just the recitation of facts, it’s a reconstruction of voice, atmosphere, and meaning. Particularly with literary biography and cultural history, you are constantly negotiating between documented truth and the inner lives of historical figures, whose motivations are often ambiguous. In that way, nonfiction can be as creatively demanding as fiction.
I tend to write early in the day, usually beginning in the quiet morning hours. I believe in discipline and consistency, so I write daily, often for four to five hours at a stretch. Much of my work is research-based, so I often alternate between writing and poring through archival materials, historical documents, or literary sources. I prefer longhand drafts and type them later. The solitude of writing suits me well.
Publishing Notes for a New Culture in 1976 gave me a clearer awareness of form, tone, and reader engagement. It shifted writing from a private endeavor into a public dialogue. I became more deliberate, balancing research with storytelling, and thought with clarity. It was the beginning of a lifelong rhythm of researching, structuring, and layering meaning into both fiction and nonfiction.
I began writing seriously in the early 1970s, though I had been composing poetry and essays since childhood. Literature was always central to my life, I was reading T.S. Eliot and Charles Dickens as a teenager and felt an early connection to language, rhythm, and the hidden narratives of history. My first published book, Notes for a New Culture, was released in 1976, and I’ve been writing continuously ever since, now for nearly 50 years.
