About

I’m a Capricorn, I like college football and long walks in the rain… wait, this ain’t the Craigslist personals. This is my personal page — not affiliated with the Charlotte Observer, where I’ve worked for 20 years, the last 12 as a columnist. Unless someone proves otherwise, I believe I’m the only journalist to cover the Super Bowl, the Bassmaster Classic and the National Spelling Bee in the same year. The Spelling Bee was, by far, the most dramatic.

I write because it’s all I know how to do — my last real job was running the projector at a drive-in movie theater — and because my family is full of storytellers. Besides the paper, my pieces appear in a few books and in a couple of other places. I’ve also spoken and taught at workshops around the country.

We live in Charlotte, North Carolina — “we” being me; my wife, Alix Felsing, without whom most of this never would have happened; and our yellow-Lab mutt, Fred, without whom none of this would have been quite as smelly.