When I was a child, I almost lost my hearing. To this day I don’t fully grasp what I lost but I’m obsessed with sounds and I try to capture them and dissect them with my pen. In the process I became a writer. I’ve already written three poetry collections (A Manual on the Human Condition; Merika, Love Poems; and Songs for Ascent) that wrestle with my own attempt to understand myself, U.S. culture, and God respectively. Even more than that, each book struggles to capture the essence of sounds humans rely on to express themselves—not the vocabulary that we flaunt to distract from our vulnerabilities, but the words we whisper to our hearts like fathoming the waves to gauge the depths of the aching.
When I don’t write, I dabble with bonsai, perform ridiculous and life-threatening stunts to entertain my newborn son, practice my Spanish with my wife, and hang out with kids and adults with developmental/mental/emotional disabilities. I also teach graduate students how to conduct research and write up reports on their research for scientific journals. Once in a while I manage to break out of the Great Central Valley of California to keep my fly-fishing passion just above rusty.
Cheers and happy readings.
Why not call by and say “Hi” at the following links:
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
Reblogged this on idealisticrebel and commented:
This is a very good blog.
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Love the imagery. It makes sense to me that you are responding to your experience in a realistic manner.
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What they said! Phnark. But seriously, that’s a very lyrical about me. Hello there, nice to meet you.
Cheers
MTM
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I can tell you’re a poet just by the way you’ve written this piece, and how you’ve told us so much in such a short piece of writing. So many authors let their words run away with them when writing about themselves (no editing process going on here!). A lengthy ‘I love myself’ chapter is so off-putting! Love the website, too!
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Love David’s opening sentence about dissecting sound with a pen – it feels like a good working definition of a poet and something that prose writers should take on as well. Most of us are very visual people and think in pictures, but if we can Inject any of the other senses into our writing we can make description live for readers – not just how something looks but also how it sounds…
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