About Dave

I am an author based in Tiffin, a small town in northwestern Ohio.

My main writing interests are fiction and a hybrid kind of writing about the past that blends fiction, local history, personal narrative, and historical documents into a unique multi-faceted examination of an event or a community. You can read more about my writing here.

Early Years

I've lived most of my life in northern or central Ohio. My father was a United Methodist minister, so my parents and three brothers and I moved from town to town while I was growing up. Two of these--Lindsey and Shelby--were small towns in the country. The other two towns--Stow and Avon Lake--were suburbs of largish cities.

I also spent nearly every summer during the 1970s at our family's cottage in Lakeside, a Methodist summer resort on Lake Erie. It was a lot less upscale and posh way back then than it has become lately, I can assure you of that. On the whole, it was a solid, middle-class upbringing by two parents devoted to their children and each other. With a large family living on a small pastor's salary, money was often tight, but none of us can complain.

Here's my family, smack-dab in the middle of the 1960s . I'm the cute one in the middle.

Education

After high school I headed south to Westerville, a suburb of Columbus, where I attended Otterbein College, the school where my parents met back in the early 1950s and where I met my wife, Sandy Ramey. We liked the small-town feel of Uptown Westerville so much that we stayed there throughout most of my graduate schooling at Ohio State, where I earned a PhD in English.

Teaching

My first teaching job at Rosary College (now Dominican University) took us to River Forest, a suburb located just west of Chicago. I taught there for six years. Living in a major metropolitan area was a big step for two kids from small-town Ohio. While we enjoyed the amenities of the big city, we never really acclimated to the crowding and traffic and crime, so we kept our eyes open for a chance to move back home to Ohio.

That chance came in 1997 when I was hired to teach at Heidelberg College, and I devoted 22 years of my life to teaching there, being awarded the Ream-Paradiso Distinguished Teaching Award, the Frost-Kalnow Professorship in the Humanities (twice), and the Distinguished Service Award. I retired from Heidelberg in May, 2019, in order to devote my time to writing.

Secret Life of Games

All my life, I've been fascinated with board games, and in my spare time I've played and designed my own. I spend a lot of time hanging around with the folks at Academy Games, playtesting submissions, refining designs, and trying out all sorts of games.

In 2018, I even had a design published: 878 Vikings, Invasions of England. I plan on continuing to enjoy this "secret" part of my life as I work on my writing career.

By the way, if you want to know more about the type of games I play and design, you can read all about them at Boardgame Geek, probably the best site on the hobby.

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