Welcome to my website. Although Chicago-born like Saul Bellows—or to be more specific, Lake Forest just like my idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald—I've been living in New Zealand ever since falling in love with a tribal pack of friends in Auckland in 2005 while taking a break from Columbia University and vowing to stay until I wrote a novel about them. All the wise counsel I sought at Columbia said to abandon your first novel—especially if it was a coming-of-age road tale, and mine was guilty of that—consider it practice, and find something else to write about. So I did.
Following their advice, I moved to Dunedin in 2010 to find Peter Gutteridge, an indie rock musician who had gained notoriety as a founding member of legendary Flying Nun bands The Clean, The Chills, and Snapper in the 1980s but little had been heard from since. A few hours after arriving, I befriended him in the supermarket and began what has now been more than a decade of immersion in South Island rock music culture. My stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Pulp Magazine, Remix Magazine, Groove Guide, New Zealand Musician, Bulletin, The Wireless, RDU, Cheap Thrills, Critic, Canta, and other places. Some of those pieces are on this site, so feel free to stay awhile and click around.
In 2022, I completed a PhD at the University of Otago on Dunedin rock music culture between 1978 and 2018.
In the process, I drank the water and formed my own indie rock band, PGX. Our debut EP came out in February 2020. Sometimes I post on my blog or YouTube channel about the steep and at times hilarious learning curve of forming your first rock band in your 30s. Our debut album, White Suit, will be released on the Christchurch indie label Melted Ice Cream in 2023. I was also cast in Martin Sagadin's Spring Interlude, an independent film shot in Christchurch that was released in 2019.
Enough people have asked about it along the way that I put my novel, High White Sound, up for free on Smashwords.
Thank you for visiting and have a lovely day.
