Most of my writing deals with understanding violence — the physical violence of war, the structural violence inherent to capitalism, and the mental violence of stressed human beings — to help us overcome it and bring peace. I began my writing career as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco, then joined the Special Forces to write a book about the Vietnam War. A World of Hurt won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its portrayal of the psychological roots of war: the blocked sexuality and need for patriarchal approval that attract men to the military. The book is now out of print, but if you e-mail me at the address below, I’ll send it to you scanned — and free, such a deal!

I followed it with a young-adult novel, CD-Ring, the story of a boy learning about the futility of violence and the need for peaceful communication.

My latest novel, Summer Snow, is set amid this current war as an American warrior falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her an alternative to the military mentality. Its theme is that higher consciousness is more effective than violence and that women may be more able than men to lead us there. It’s published by Avatar, and the first three chapters are serialized on ShatterColors.

My new book is a return to journalism. Radical Peace: People Refusing War tells the first-person experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in Iraq, Afghanistan, North America, and Europe. It’s a narrative journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people who have moved beyond demonstrations and petitions into direct action, defying the government’s laws and impeding its capacity to wage war. The book has just been published by TrineDay.

Articles you may enjoy:
“German Jewish Community Begins Again”
“The Tenor of Our Times”
“Sedition, Subversion, Sabotage”
“Wolf Country”

I also teach creative writing and was a Fulbright professor at universities in Germany, where I’m currently living.

The book I’m now writing, WELLSPRINGS: A Fable of Consciousness, deals with the effects of
Transcendental Meditation on collective consciousness, particularly as applied to peace and ecology.
I was made a teacher of TM by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1971.