About Me

I was born in Cardiff, the capital of Wales and received a degree from the University of Nottingham and then completed an MA and PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The older photograph is of me, my mother and my elder sister over 60 years ago. I have a younger brother who is 12 years younger than me. My sister and brother both live in the UK.

I am an immigrant (born and raised in Wales) with a name (common for males in my home country of Wales) that confuses me as female. That might explain why I love to explore and write, in serious and comic dramatic forms, stories of those who, through choice or happenstance, find themselves strangers in a strange land (or even in their own land). In addition, I share the immigrants’ attempts to “navigate as safely as possible through an ever-shifting landscape of independent and unpredictable powers” (Alan Jacabs), and the difficulty of coalescing given and adopted values and ways of seeing.

I am Emeritus Professor, English and Creative Writing at California State University, Chico. I served six years as Chair of English.

Although I retired, I continue to teach courses for seniors (currently in virtual classrooms):

  • Hail to the Celts (a history of the Celtic peoples),
  • Myths, Legends and stories of the Celtic peoples.
  • "Will" - a TV series based on the life of William Shakespeare,
  • A look at some Shakespeare plays,
  • Writing for film and stage.

My main teaching areas were Shakespeare, medieval, restoration and contemporary Drama, Native-American literature, Celtic Literature, Critical Thinking, and Humanities.

I sing tenor in a choir and am a black belt in Sinmoo Hapkido. I assist weekly at a Community Food Locker giving food and breakfast to the poor. I am married to Dani Elliott and live in Chico, California. I frequently return to Britain to visit my sister and brother.

My favourite quotation is

“The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.”

Andre Malraux