Biography

Call me a Prairie boy: I was born in Edmonton, spent formative years in Regina (Go, Lions band!), and settled in Winnipeg for high school (Kelvin) and university (U of Winnipeg), where I studied psychology and English.

Still moving eastward, I did graduate studies at York University, starting out in counselling but ending up in psycholinguistics. After my PhD I did a postdoc at the University of Colorado, studying text comprehension.

Then I had the good fortune to land a teaching position at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Over my thirty-seven years at STU, I taught cognitive psychology, research methods, statistics, introductory psychology, history of psychology, psychology of music…and probably one or two others. As a teacher, what most emphasized—what I “professed”—was student writing (e.g., I normally required multiple drafts). Writing and reading were also the main topics of my scholarly work.

After retiring from teaching, I began a new career as a freelance academic editor. Distance courses through Ryerson University (copyediting, proofreading, fiction editing) were valuable for my editing know-how. Ongoing music performance (woodwinds, choral) has been (and continues to be) valuable for my sanity.

Given my background, it’s not surprising that most of the manuscripts I work with represent different genres of academic writing: journal articles, books, dissertations, book and grant proposals, and the like. Even so, my interests are alarmingly broad (I’m more fox than hedgehog), ranging from nonfiction trade books to fiction to web content.