I grew up in northern Rhode Island, in a two-family house built by my grandfather. Several generations had already made lives there before my parents, my brother Stephen, and I added our own chapter. Upstairs lived first my grandparents and later Rene—a grandmother in every way that mattered.
The house possessed its own personality: French doors, thick carpet, a staircase connecting two households, and traditions that seemed to carry atmospheres of their own. I learned early to notice the details that made a place feel inhabited.
As I grew older, music, film, books, and performance opened doors into other interior worlds. Before I had language for queerness—or for much of what I experienced—I understood that art could make another form of life imaginable. It showed me that something could be beautifully constructed without concealing the private life beneath it.
That tension—between craft and revelation, composure and permeability—continues to guide what I read, watch, collect, write, and notice in people.
I now live in Tucson, a dramatic departure from the landscape in which I was raised. I am a therapist, writer, reader, record collector, devoted watcher of film, and curator of objects that carry history.
I like objects that reveal where they have been. I like rooms that feel inhabited. I am suspicious of anything polished so completely that no evidence of life remains.
In all of these parts of my life, I return to the same practice: paying attention.