My Story
Growing Up
I have always liked telling stories. As far back as I can remember I have made up stories and myths with whatever I had around me. My childhood was full of quests and battles, heists and mysteries played out with Legos, Playmobiles, cardboard, marbles and whatever else I could get my hands on. The first fictional universe I fell in love with was Lego BIONICLE. Its epic story spanned hundreds of thousands of years, featured hundreds of named characters, a mysterious land, monstrous creatures, and a desperate quest to save the universe, all told across books, comics, web shorts, movies, and games. I was completely enamored. As I got older, my parents gladly fed my ravenous imagination with a near-endless supply of worlds to explore. Redwall, Ranger’s Apprentice, Chronicles of Narnia, Eragon, Wizard of Earth Sea, Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, and so many more. As my mom says, “There are so many books, and not enough time.” I find this goes for every medium: books, TV, movies, comics, games. So consider this a preemptive thank you for even engaging this much with my writing.
Around the age of 11, I was introduced to Lord of the Rings. As you can imagine, I was immediately obsessed with both books and films. I read them front to back, appendices included. We had the extended edition box set on DVD and I watched every special feature. All the commentaries by artists, directors and actors. Every vignette on how each prop and computer model was made. I also began to enjoy history at this time. My mom, who was my homeschool teacher until I was a freshman in high school, excelled at showing what was important and why. The scope of it all soaked in. It made the world feel so big, so old. With all these things in mind, I suppose it really isn’t a surprise I chose to start writing myths.
College and Graduate School
In high school, I began to realize that I enjoyed thinking about why people did the things they did. This led me to study psychology in college at Taylor University. I greatly enjoyed undergrad and made many great friends. I was also able to get my start in academic writing. Dr. Laura McClelland had asked me and several other psychology students to be a part of my research team. I gladly agreed. The way that she treated all of us seriously, even though we were young, was greatly empowering and eventually culminated in us presenting our research at the Midwest Psychological Association conference and the American Psychological Association conference.
Taylor is also the place where I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons. Soon, I was running games myself. This unlocked something in me. I realized that the only thing stopping me from writing my stories was just me sitting down and writing them. I had plenty of ideas that at least my friends seemed to like so why not put them down on paper and see where it took me. Combined, these experiences gave me the confidence to start writing my stories.
I continued writing my stories in graduate school to get my Master’s of Science in Industrial and Organizational Science. I also finished and published my first scholarly article in 2023. Dr. McClelland and I published in The Journal of Environmental Psychology. I also began working full-time for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a public safety exam developer in 2023. I continued working there until shortly after I completed my Master’s in 2024, when I began my current position with the American Institutes for Research.
2024 was also a big year for me because I married my lovely wife, Aubri, in March of that year. We currently live together in the Boston area.