Although I went to Harvard where I studied under Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald, and served as poetry editor of The Harvard Advocate, I am an independent poet and writer--that is, without an MFA or educational institution affiliation. It was and remains my opinion that to write differently you need to live differently, and so it is that even as I wrote and published poetry I worked as a commercial fisherman and yacht skipper, and lived as a part time expat on a remote island in the West Indies. All that came to an end in 2010 when I sufffered a spinal cord injury; but I continue to write and participate in coastal and urban life to the extent I can.