About Me

Sometime in the early '80s, I read a Mother Earth News feature about running a paperback book exchange, and it never quite let go of me. By the early '90s I'd decided I was going to open a bookstore. That's also when I got the idea for writing a book of my own, and I still have that idea.

When I get a novel finished, I plan to write a nonfiction book and call it How to Write a Novel in 35 Years.

None of this came out of nowhere. I volunteered in the school library and the public library from about fifth grade on, for no better reason than wanting to be near books. I spent long afternoons in the local bookstore paging through B. Kliban's cats (yes, the mousies song), and staring at the illustrations in Gnomes until I could have drawn them from memory. I also read plays at a steady clip, Albee through Wilder. I never did find a Z.

My taste has never had much discipline. I'll take Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, Austen, Dickens, and the Brontës, Michael Cunningham's The Hours, and whatever's on the next shelf over. Whenever someone asks me what my favorite book is, I say To Kill a Mockingbird, just so I'll have an answer. That may even be true.

Eventually I earned an MA in English and began teaching college English in 2010. Later came a second stint in bookselling, a stint that turned out to need a splint, and most recently I'm back in the classroom at Olympic College. It completes my collection of teaching at all the community colleges in the area: Tacoma Community College, Pierce College (both campuses), Green River College, and Clover Park Technical College.

Somewhere along the way, teaching intro literature and poetry classes, I fell for poetry. I finished about 99% of an MFA in Creative Writing but never wrote the thesis. That still sticks in my craw, so keep an eye out. I may have something up my sleeve to do with that. I've started writing poems of my own, and even sending them out into the world. And I'm working on a verse novel from one of my three incomplete prose manuscripts.

Oh, did I mention I always wanted to start a magazine? So I did very recently: Inkhorn Review, where I'm the founding editor. And a podcast? I've done that too, two separate times. The current one is Life on Words, where I ask writers and other book professionals what a career in words has cost them and what it's given back.

I do art too.

Once a month, here on this website, I write a letter called Heath vs. Words about all of this and more: the classroom, the conversations, what I'm reading, and how my own writing is going. I'll let you know where my writing appears in the world, once it starts showing up there.

In the meantime, I hope you'll pull up a chair.