About Jim

Jim has done everything from delivering pharmacy prescriptions to selling automobiles, from working alongside migrants at agricultural labor to competitively showing horses. After a two year study of ornamental horticulture at Michigan State University, he served in the U.S. Army medical corps between the Korean and Vietnam wars, then joined his family’s landscape design and construction company.

Running a family business brought him, along with those pleasures, thirty-five years sweating payrolls and bank loans, worrying over the weather and dealing with periodic real estate crises. He closed his company in late 1992 and moved to Europe to write, travel and see the world from a different perspective, much of it from a motorcycle.

His writing clearly indicates that the key for him to surviving personal difficulties and bridging generations is a wry sense of humor. Much like a minister peppering his sermons with jokes, Jim takes the serious issues of war, poverty or human rights and makes them palatable through wit, irony and down-to-earth bluntness. Through his writing, the sum of his knowledge and life experience crystallize into an ability to ‘say it like it is’ and the wisdom to listen to reader response. Literary friendships, he believes, are born of that.