The theme, silencing, dominates my writing. I’ve written about the violent destruction of books and libraries, about thwarted women writers, about claiming my own voice, and about a serial killer who erased at least twenty-two wives. I am currently working on a book on Nazi Book Burning, the epitome of ceremonial silencing. Silencing was carried with me as I transformed myself from a professor at the University of Hawaii to a writer and purveyor of intelligent entertainment.
You can check out my academic background here. My research area focused on the fate of books and libraries and the motivation that led regimes to destroy them. Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the 20th Century, was published by Praeger in 2003. This led me to an affiliation with the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Three years later, I published Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction, all the while writing chapters in other books and giving presentations and interviews.
I followed my side interests in socialization, national identity, literature, and biography and published a third book, Children’s Literature and National Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation in 2012. With it, I moved away from writing a standard academic work toward something more creative. While scholars have unearthed treasure troves of information, they speak mainly to each other and in a style that locks out non-academic readers. I believed that it was possible to write intelligent and appealing cross-over books and put academic discoveries out there. I’d do it.
My plan was to marry the rigor of academic research with story-telling and literary techniques. So, I retired in 2014 and moved to London for a two-year Creative Writing program at City University. I brought a project with me (Censoring Lives) and explored the lives of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century women writers. I visited their homes and burial sites and read their works and biographies as if starved. I joined the London Library and the Biography Club, went to talks at the British Library and London Review Bookshop, and lived the literary life in London. This experience is recorded in my memoir London Sojourn: Rewriting Life after Retirement.
There are different ways to present cultural information, so I also signed up for a nine-month Guiding Course at the University of Westminster (2014-2015). This was an intense immersion in how to construct and conduct street walks. Guiding is, of course, fact-based storytelling.
I also listed with an agency and began to lecture on luxury cruise ships (including the Cunard, Viking, and Azamara lines). My 45-minute Power Point lectures structured facts in an interesting, coherent way. They focused on silencing, cultural preservation as an antidote to destruction, cultural history, colonization, and biography.
After relocating in 2016 to Portland, Oregon, to be near family, I served on the board of the Oregon Writers Colony and coordinated its Sylvia Beach Annual Writers Conference for three years. My friends in OWC tend to write fiction which is fine with me as I continue to absorb fictional/literary techniques as a means of delivering nonfiction.
Emily Dickinson Had to Have Curls: The Feminine Masks Forced on Women Writers was self-published in 2024 and my memoir London Sojourn will come out January, 2026.
Lethal Matrimony: The Forgotten Tale of a Pacific Northwest Serial Killer, about an early-twentieth century killer of over 22 wives, will appear Spring, 2027.
Page last updated: 11/11/25
Page created: 03/15/18