Member Profile

Tell me a little about yourself, where you were born, your family, your education, your career? I have an unusual family backstory. My movie-star-beautiful mother was from Italy; the Nazis occupied her village in Umbria and she was sent to the city of Livorno to serve as a domestic for the household of an Italian army officer, where she was mistreated, to what extent I'm not sure as she was loath to say much about it. An American GI saw the situation and helped extricate her as Italy was being liberated. They married and lived happily in Italy for a few years, but when the marriage was transplanted to his hometown of Milwaukee it went south - she caught him cheating. She had her green card and chose to stay and work in the US after the divorce rather than return to the domestic life of women in Italy at the time. In the Italian neighborhood of Milwaukee she unwittingly fell in with the criminal element there - she had never heard of the Mafia, being from the north of Italy - and again she was rescued, this time by a German! The man who would become my father. He was from a modest background, his father having died young, leaving his mother to support the family by taking a job on the bottling line at the then-massive Schlitz brewery. Dad didn't have the means for college, but he was a successful salesman, of printing equipment, saved his commissions, invested them and made enough to start his own printing business which thrived for fifty years in downtown Milwaukee, allowing me to have every advantage growing up as an only child. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, grad school at Northwestern (where I have cousins on the faculty, my Chicago family), was a sportswriter at the Milwaukee Journal in my 20s and later a press secretary and staff chief in the Wisconsin Legislature. I got an MFA in writing and literature later in life from Bennington College; nowadays I write fiction, and I teach literature, sportswriting and strategic communication in the School of Journalism at my college alma mater, Wisconsin. My main home is in Milwaukee with a small apartment near campus where I hang midweeks. What is your spiritual path? My mother was a devout Catholic, and though I was confirmed in my father's Lutheran church, I embraced the Catholic faith growing up. Coming out as a gay man into the height of the AIDS epidemic changed that. I unwittingly exposed myself to the virus before it was well known. A man I'd dated died early in the crisis; I'd put myself at only minor risk, but that wasn't obvious at the time. With no test and no treatment and no spiritual support from the church as friends were taking terminally ill, in my panic I was taken in by Unitarians, and on the recommendation of a grad school counselor discovered breathing exercises - meditation - were a more effective alternative to prayer. It ended up saving a life I'd been ready to end. I've been practicing Zen mostly on my own for 30 years. I still split my spiritual life between Christianity and Buddhism, though I feel the two faiths express common ineffable truths in different human language; I'm active in a progressive Episcopal church near my home in Milwaukee. What brought you to ZLMC? Has it helped? My husband of 32 years died suddenly last March of a massive heart attack, after having been outwardly in perfect shape and health. The situation was a koan I couldn't handle solo; I'd been a member only of a small sangha without a resident Zen master. In a Madison bookstore not long after Hal's death, I saw a book facing outward from the Eastern Religions shelf: Appreciate Your Life, by Taizan Maezumi Roshi. I felt if I could appreciate my life at that dark moment, I was home free. The book helped me, and I became curious as to whether there was a Zen center anywhere nearby in the Maezumi lineage. I went online and discovered ZLMC, where that night a class was scheduled on overcoming obstacles and loss in life. I sped down in my car from Milwaukee and have been coming back ever since, a weekend or so a month, allowing me to visit my relatives in the area and indulge another of my religions, Chicago Cubs baseball. Anything else you’d like to say? This sangha rocks. I feel like I was looking all my life for a vibrant Zen community that was tailored to modern America rather than the Asia of centuries ago. We're not a bunch of lazy monks trying to escape hard agrarian life. We're already overworked and sleep-deprived. We don't need additional layers of ritual complexity in our spiritual lives and more exhaustion on retreat. The atmosphere at the center is amazingly warm and caring and supportive and light-hearted, an antidote to so much of the rest of our culture. Yet the core of the teaching is intact and serious as a heartbeat. I bow in deep appreciation to all of you.