An odd influence for a writer perhaps, yet it became the starting point, ‘The Grasshopper and the Ants. I was five, my mother was teaching me how to read from McGuffey’s First Reader; I have the whole collection by the by. It was then she also read me that Aesop’s tale, I remember asking how is he the bad guy when he gave the gift of playing his music for free. The query was met with a puzzlement, so I stayed on the path of the Grasshopper, still convinced he is the real hero of the story.

As with writers, the gift is given and if not applied to benefit in love, that same gift is ill-used and rescinded. Such is the honor required to write and to seek the truth however impalpable it may be. This lead to not only writing the history of my own parish of Saint John’s, but searching the Catholic history of North America, for volume one of two, ‘Our Tenacity of Faith.’

The journey has and is not without its times of difficulty, yet one carries on because that is the job, to write and to write well.