I've included a conventional resume (PDF format) which is one way of explaining who I am and what I do. Perhaps a better way is if I give a few sentences about how I came to work as a counselor using writing for self-exploration.

Background

I was born in England and educated there. In 1983 I completed my doctorate in English Literature at Oxford University, where I had discovered that the finest authors write not simply for money or to create an enduring piece of art, but because in the act of writing they were able to explore and understand the deepest levels of human motivation that they were capable of exploring.

After teaching literature at Oxford and at Fairleigh Dickinson University I decided I wanted to understand more about psychology and I took a position with Peper Harow Therapeutic Community—an experimental establishment working with disturbed adolescents. I started to use writing and literature with the adolescents as a way to talk about personal issues that were too hard to express directly.

Continuing Work in the U.S.

In 1986 I came to the U.S. I began work at Curry College in Milton, MA. Working with the learning disabled and later with the prison programs of the University of Massachusetts (Boston) and Boston College, I was able to develop the writing exercises I had begun to use in England. This convinced me that writing could offer advantages denied to conventional talk therapy, and I realized that in this way troubled individuals could be enabled to help themselves, often more readily than by other methods.

In 1996 I compiled some of the exercises that had been so successful into a volume called The Therapeutic Uses of Writing. This was reprinted as The Sanity Manual. I use it as a set text in many of my classes. In 2000 I produced a second volume, Life Passages.

I live in Watertown, MA, where I have a private practice. I still work at Curry College, where I am a full professor of English and a co-leader of classes in the Honors Program.

Click here to download my full resume.
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