About ME

After living most of my life in Canada, I moved to Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 2019 and was adopted by my wife's family. Four years later, I identify as Cholo-Canadiense. When I was in my twenties, I tripped on The Teachings of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda, which introduced me to stories of alternative realities. Later, I became an avid reader of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende and a fan of magic realism.

Living here in Guayaquil, I came to realize that many people experience reality in a manner outside of the Western mindset, a syncretic blend of Catholicism and indigenous beliefs, a spiritual existence unlike anything I had known in North America. Here, the stories of brujos and brujas and the magic they wield are not simply fantastic tales, but narratives that tell of mysterious, real-world events that actually occur in people’s lives, set against the backdrop of a fervent Catholic faith in which people talk to God and the saints every day.

Before I began writing The Lost Souls of Guayaquil, a blood clot nearly killed me. I later learned that my disease has a mortality rate of over 90% and that my recovery, which made me something of a celebrity in the hospital, was reported in a medical journal, the secular equivalent of a miraculous recovery.

While in a coma, I experienced a dream world as intense as the real world I had known. It was a mindscape of people and places I knew mixed with strangers and unfamiliar settings that seemed real. Looking back, I believe that the memories of these intense other-worldly experiences fed my imagination and colored the descriptions of the Other World found in my novel.

One thing to know about me is that I am a lifelong learner of languages. In addition to English, I speak French and Spanish fluently, and I am now learning Brazilian Portuguese, all languages transplanted to the Americas by European conquerors. I am very conscious of the role of imperial conquest in creating the world into which I was born. Many of the themes found in my first novel explore what happens when the New and Old Worlds collide.