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Background

In July 2018, after many years, my wife and I moved from San Francisco to Asheville, North Carolinia. In 2021, we live between the two places. My wife, Barbara Roether, is a middle school humanities teacher and a Montessori curriculum developer, as well as a poet and novelist. Her first novel, This Earth You'll Come Back To, was published in 2015. Among her nonfiction books: Inside Tibetan Buddhism, written with Robert Thurman.

And then three children, my novels.

I was born in Los Angeles, grew up in New York City, and have lived in various cities around the country, including Charlottsville, Virginia; Omaha, and Miami, as well as in both France and Morocco.

Marina, 44 (MD, Brown; MPH, Yale;  family doctor in Asheville,  NC

Dylan, 35 (BA, Bates College), 

VP, Talent Relations, Vayner. Media.

Family

My father started out as a magazine editor for Hearst, then a publicist  for David Selznick.  He became the original Don Draper., both charming and dangerous and an inveterate gambler. He was also an inventor and a screenwriter. And finally a pretty good painter, although he had no lasting belief in his talent and so did mostly copies of obscure French Impressionists.

My mother was a fashion model and photographer, and a professional tennis player, known for her serve and volley game. In sum, a renaissance woman forever starting all over again, forever prowling through the world.   In the last 20 years of her life, she hid out in the South of France and later in British Columbia, in spiritual retreats oriented to the teachings of the Bulgarian mystic, Omraan Mikhael Aivanhov.

Education

Creighton University, 1975, MA, International Relations. Thesis: "Decision-Making Patterns in the Arab Middle East."

University of Virginia, 1971, BA, French Literature. Spent the last two and a half years studying with the renowned short story writer, Peter Taylor, and so came into the world of literary writing.

Military

Served as the USAF historian for an intelligence processing wing at Strategic Air Command, headquartered in Omaha, from 1971 to 1975. Wrote a 150-page, Top Secret / Codeword quarterly account of the wing's technical activities. Photo interpreters in this wing found Soviet missile canisters in Cuba in 1962.

Dash, 26 (BA, UC Davis) , coaches  youth soccer teams in San Francisco  

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