A Work of Love's Imagination & Homesick Nostalgia. I was always an author and poet, even while stationed far from 'the World' in 1970s West Germany. This is my long-lost novel, finally published after gathering dust for 40 years. It sparkles with life, melancholy, and passion as if it had been written today.

When I was 27 and a soldier in West Germany 1975-1980, I did a great many things. I worked hard at my day job in the U.S. Army barracks where I was stationed. I traveled all over Europe in my orange VW bus (Paris, Brussels, Luxembourg, Heidelberg, etc). And I was privately an author.

Many nights, when I was not downtown in Kaiserslautern bar hopping with my U.S. buddies or German friends, I would go back to the office near my barracks. I would write in solitude to gentle strains of Mozart, while ghosts and moths fluttered around me. I wrote several novels during those years, a lot of poetry, and short stories. I'd been a published poet and a professional writer-editor-news reporter by age 18, so this was a serious passion and an ambition rather than a trivial hobby. I had an English degree (B.A., University of Connecticut), spoke several languages, had been born in Europe and spent my childhood there. I was born a U.S. citizen, and came home to New Haven, Connecticut at around 10 when my father retired from the U.S. Army. My mother was a Luxembourg citizen.

My "27." Now available: the double-header. I had another neglected manuscript from age 27, my poetry collection. This project is still a work in progress—capturing a long-lost moment in time and space, long ago and far away.

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