Book excerpt: Born in Sydney, Australia, the son of an American sailor and an Australian school teacher, I was raised and educated in the United States, my childhood spent on a small farm in the Midwest and my adolescence in the suburbs of Los Angeles. I worked in the Post Office in San Francisco for five years and then taught French and English in a small country town in New South Wales, Australia, during the seventies. The character of its people, the austere beauty and the sense of space of this continent left a deep impression upon me and can be seen in my poems. I began experimenting with poetry in the early eighties, and this became a genuine passion in l984 when I was selected as one of fifteen Washington, D.C. area poets for the Jenny McKean Moore Poetry Workshop at The George Washington University taught by Julia Alvarez. My short stories have appeared inContempa, an Australian literary review, and my poetry in a number of U.S. reviews including Visions, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The George Mason Review, The Atlanta Review and others. My work appears in two anthologies: Hungry As We Are, (Washington Writers Publishing House, l995) and Free State : A Harvest of Maryland Poets (A Scop Publications anthology, l989). My first collection of poems, Painting at Night was published in 1994. I was a French and English teacher in Prince Georges County and now live in Annapolis, Maryland. I am a member of the Washington Writers Center and have participated in readings and writing workshops there and at various locations throughout the Washington-Baltimore area. My other passions are travel, dogs, and jazz, all of which enrich my poetry.