Almost everyone offering this is a kind person with a recorder.

I have been published in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Missouri Review, Intima at Columbia, Folklife in BC, STAT News, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and in peer-reviewed clinical journals. Everything is online and free. Do not take any of this on faith — go and read it.

Before writing, I ran a travel consultancy for thirty-four years. That is more relevant than it sounds. Three decades of sitting across from people while they explained what they actually wanted, as opposed to what they first said, turns out to be the same skill as interviewing a family.

I also do clinical research — decision provenance, and what happens to a measurement when nobody records the context it was taken in. The discipline is identical to the one on this site. The same refusal to invent a missing fact in a family history is the refusal to smooth over a missing figure in a dataset. Both are forms of not filling the gap.

How I write about faith

I am a professional writer, not a chaplain and not a ghost-testimony service. What I bring is craft and an absolute rule: your family’s faith goes on the page the way your family holds it. Your language, your tradition, your distinctives, your own account of what happened and what it meant.

I do not adjust anybody’s theology to make a sentence read better, I do not flatten denominational differences into a general warmth, and I do not put words of belief into a dead person’s mouth because they would round the chapter off nicely. Where a family disagrees about what somebody believed, both accounts go in. Where the record is silent, the writing says so.

That is why the second promise on the front page is stated as bluntly as it is. It is the same promise as nothing invented, pointed at doctrine — and it is the reason a Presbyterian congregation and a Catholic parish can both hand me their history without worrying about what comes back.

Where I work

Montréal, Québec. All interviews are by secure video, so location is irrelevant — I have worked with families several time zones apart, and the only genuine scheduling constraint is somebody who naps at three in the afternoon.

I take a limited number of commissions each season, because the interview and archival work does not compress and I will not pretend it does.