I was born with a God that did not survive. My yearning for life exposed the lies. I was the son of a yarn-mill night-shift worker who preached and played piano at a Pentecostal church on Sundays. By four, I was singing at funerals in the Appalachians, a barefoot Anointed One in a secondhand white shirt, carrying a King James Bible bigger than I was. A rickety wooden altar was my first stage. There have been many since.

Thirty years as an Evangelical megachurch arts director followed: five churches, thousands of Sundays, tens of thousands of people. But religion withered my soul; it shamed my lust for life. In 2006 I resigned. Voluntarily. My first life fragmented. I renounced my ordination and religion, lost my nuclear family and most of my friends. My children ostracized me.

The American South may have been my birthplace, but Barcelona has become my home. The small-mindedness and privations of the United States were ultimately too provincial for my longings, which demanded sensuality, curiosity, intimacy, and freedom. After all, deep in the forests of the Appalachian Mountains, you can’t see and feel and taste the wonders of the world.

I write and paint and live now in Barcelona, a city that felt like jardín del Edén the moment I arrived. My wife and muse Gina, a former champion equestrian, has been beside me for fifteen years, encouraging and championing me.

I’ve published twelve books under my own imprint: memoir, novella, confessions, enjoying life, an erotic gothic novel, my first, and more. 

I organize my life around four essentials, because a person like me needs a framework or they’ll scatter: tasting the body, feeding the mind, baring the soul, freeing the spirit. 

My therapist called me a herald, someone who senses the cracks in time before anyone else. It’s a blessing and a curse. I’ve been highly sensitive since before that phrase existed, a man too gentle to live among the wolves, and hopelessly, voraciously curious about everything from Jung to psychedelics to sex.

I read voraciously, listen harder than I talk (most days), need long stretches of solitude, and then crave a table full of people I enjoy and respect. Complicated, highly sensitive, multi-layered, and by my own frequent admission, perpetually misunderstood. A golden child in black sheep’s clothing. Southern by birth, Spanish by a twist of fate. 

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