Seven years of military life form an important part of that story. As an operator, I learned how much depends on trust, judgement, timing, and the person beside you. But a life in uniform is more than its missions. It is also the friendships built between them, the humour that survives the darkest circumstances, the people you love, and the ordinary moments that become extraordinary when you look back. My writing explores that whole experience: what we see, what we live through, what we carry home, and the lives we build beyond service.
Writing is my way of making sense of it all. It gives experience a language, memory a place, and reflection a purpose. Some things become clearer when they are put into words; others reveal questions worth staying with. Through writing, I turn towards those experiences with honesty and curiosity, finding connections between a deeply personal past and the things that make us human.
Across memoir, poetry, and literary fiction, I explore the contrasts within a life: discipline and freedom, courage and uncertainty, responsibility and desire. I am interested in what happens when the uniform comes off and the story continues, through professional life, relationships, fatherhood, and the changing understanding of who we are.
My style is lyrical and grounded in the senses. A familiar voice, a shared joke, the changing sound of the world beneath the water: small details can hold entire years. They bring people close and give the reader a way into an experience beyond the facts of what happened.
The people in my writing matter as people, not merely as figures in a story about service or survival. I want their laughter on the page, their imperfections, their ambitions, and the gestures that made them unmistakably themselves. To remember someone honestly is to honour the fullness of their life, not only the circumstances in which you knew or lost them.
Beyond the page and my professional life, there is my family, swimming, and walks with our dog. Being a husband and father continues to shape my perspective. A conversation with my wife, a question from one of my daughters, an afternoon together: these moments are as much a part of my story as anything that came before.
I write to understand, to remember, and to connect. To give the past its place without allowing it to contain the whole story. Seven years in uniform are part of who I am; the life that follows continues to give me reasons to write.
