A native West Virginian, he is the author of six books, including his recent memoir Confessions of an Introvert: The Solitary Path to Emotional Maturity, Living Myth: Personal Meaning As a Way of Life (Shambhala, 1993) and The Archetype of Renewal (Inner City, 2003). Fiction is his lifelong passion, with short stories including "The Mountain Song" appearing in The Mountain Review and "An Evening at the Symphony" in Scribner. Healing Lily (2010) was his debut novel, followed by My Stranger (2012).

In a recent interview he noted: "It took me nearly fifty year to find acceptance of my near-death experience when I was fifteen years old," he said in a recent interview. "I did not know what to make of the tunnel, coming to a gate, and being given a choice about how to live my life. I kept the experience such a secret. Then I realized that was the story. All my life I have tried to understand my near-death experience, first in the academic study of religion and then in psychoanalysis. Coming to terms turned out to be a coming to maturity."

"Now that's a funny thing," he continued. "All of a sudden I needed to think about the process of becoming mature. What does it really mean? How far could the process of self-development go? I understood this was turning into a book about individuation and that I would need at least one case example of at least thirty years to illustrate the development of the personality over a long period of time. The only case I felt comfortable sharing was my own life. Now I really had a problem. The last thing a writer wants to write is a memoir because, well, you know, do you really want to show people how mundane and boring a life can be? As a writer, for me the trick was to learn learn to trust the narrative, trust the story, and to see the central figure as a character in a book, even if that central character was myself. I think in that way I was able to write with more emotion, finding myself describing feelings. While that was difficult, I found it really helpful insofar as I guess I had never really dug deep enough to quite remember how things felt at times."

"I was pleased to be able to write about my grandparents.They were wonderful people, deep in the heart of West Virginia. I found myself in somewhat of a dialog with them about maturity, about natural individuation, and maybe about how the compulsion to create a legacy, which I experienced from them, is a natural form of the Jungian opus. I learned so much from remembering my grandparents, I dedicated the book to them. It only seemed right."