I'm a Canadian-born, San Francisco-based writer with a weakness for all the nice things: food and wine, and architecture and design, and technology and culture. To offset all that goodness, I scour these happy-go-lucky worlds for stories of calamity and existential dread. Balance in all things.

I'm a contributing editor at Azure, the Toronto-based magazine of architecture and design. Over the past 15 years, my stories have appeared in such dead tree print outlets as Bloomberg Businessweek, the Globe and Mail, Departures, Wine & Spirits, Canadian Business, Chatelaine, Fairmont, the Walrus, and Reader's Digest. My original e-book An Inconvenient Fruit – the true story of a passionate group of winemakers who struggle to outrun an unstoppable vine killer called phylloxera – was published by CWG in 2014. 

From 2013 to 2018, I held the single best job in Canadian media: national restaurant critic for enRoute, Air Canada's in-flight mag. My annual Canada's Best New Restaurants feature, which earned multiple National Magazine Awards, required me to criss-cross the country from coast to coast for several weeks each summer, dining out in strict anonymity. Yes, fake names and everything – it was the least suspenseful, most fattening John le Carré novel ever written. 

How'd I get here? I grew up in British Columbia and shipped east to study History of Science at Harvard, where I wrote a thesis about the mathematics of the musical octave during the era of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. I've since lived and worked (and DJ'd) in Chicago, Toronto, Paris, Johannesburg, Boston, and Washington, D.C. – like the Beach Boys, I get around. And in keeping with the Beach Boys parallels, I currently make my home in sunny California. 

Most days you’ll find me working in my office at the Writers Grotto, a Bay Area storytellers’ collective founded in 1994 that has nurtured such authors as Kaui Hart Hemmings and Noah Hawley, or swimming in the treacherous waters of San Francisco Bay with my compatriots from the Dolphin Club, an athletic organization founded in 1877 by hypothermic masochists. One time, I wrote a story for the Dolphin Club’s quarterly magazine and the universe imploded. So it goes.