About me
If you want to know about my professional career, you can check out my resume. Otherwise, I spent my first few years in Chicago, then my family moved to Evanston when I was in third grade.
I went to Evanston Township High School and was a wholly unspectacular cross-country and track runner, then went to Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. It was a pretty tough transition–my graduating class at Evanston was nearly as big as Lawrence’s student body.
I graduated and took a job in Chicago as an intern for bow-tied U.S. Senator Paul Simon, who remains one of the coolest politicians ever. I still remember meeting him and then, later that day, seeing him across the office. He looked over and saw me, raised his can of RC cola, smiled and waved. It was like a commercial for RC (an underrated caffeinated, carbonated beverage, if you ask me). Then I took a job with a publishing house and learned I did not have the temperament to make it as a proofreader. After foundering for a while, I ended up in grad school at the University of Montana. Oh, how I loved Missoula.
Montana is a heady, wonderful state, and if you haven’t been there you should go. The mountains, the endless land, the sky… I know they call it “Big Sky Country” (and the late, brilliant Chris Whitley wrote a song by the same name), but there really is something different about the sky there–the clouds are bigger, more dramatic. The sky is bluer. The sunsets are epic. So, head out there, if you can.
I was in Missoula for two wonderful years, but I was making no money and didn’t know what I was doing, so it was time to leave. I got a job with a small paper in Northern California (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Point Reyes Light) in West Marin County. I paid my journalistic dues there, covering water-district hearings and the like. But I also was at ground zero when a massive forest fire ravaged the area and came within a a few acres of where I was living. I lived there for about a year and a half and it was beautiful, but it was a really, really small town, I was making less than $20k, and I couldn’t even pay the interest on my student loans. So I moved back in to my parents home in Evanston (see “Dependence Day”). Things were, as they say, grim.
Eventually, I got a job with Chicago Lawyer magazine and moved out from under my parents’ roof. I was there for just a few months, then I got a position as a features writer at the Daily Herald in the suburbs. I spent an eventful seven years there, meeting a woman who would become my wife (then ex-wife) and writing about all sorts of topics, from reviewing the Rolling Stones to working on story about a mass murder in Palatine to interviewing a prickly Harrison Ford.
I left the suburbs in 2004 to take a job as a senior editor with Time Out Chicago magazine. I was there for three years, eventually working my way up to Editor. I also got remarried during this time, and on June 7 last year my wife Jeanne gave birth to our daughter, Maggie. I won’t go on and on about how cute she is, but it’s not easy to refrain. I became Editor of Time Out last year, and we parted ways in November. Since then, I’ve been freelancing, running, and learning how to relate to a growling toddler. And so it goes.