My Heart Has No Home

I am the author of the book My Heart Has No Home: A Journal of Grief and Healing, a moment-by-moment account of my experience grieving the sudden death of my wife, Amy K.W. Heil – what I felt, how I healed, and what I learned.

Where to buy My Heart Has No Home: Amazon paperback and Kindle / Apple Books / Kobo / B&N and Nook

I’ve been interviewed on several podcasts about my grief story, and about the book:

Grief Is My Side Hustle by Meghan Riordan Jarvis, on 12/16/2022
Grief Trails by Amanda Kernahan, on 2/8/2023
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To My Life® with Laura Muirhead, on 3/22/2023

About me: I want to identify as a screenwriter, but as with most of my 25-year IT career, I find myself collecting multiple hats in my literary pursuits. I have always loved playing with words, and remember at the age of four referring to my elbow as my “ell bone” – because my arm was ell shaped. Growing up, I read constantly (200 books one summer for a library contest), engaged in creative word usement with my siblings (many nouns were verbed), and actually enjoyed writing essays in school.

In high school I began to see myself as a writer, thanks to a creative writing class – where I wrote my first story by imagining it as a movie – and encouragement from my favorite English teacher. In college, I tried to become a geophysicist, but ended up with a job writing press releases and a B.A. in Linguistics (perhaps the acme of word and language geekery), after which I stumbled into IT. Even then, I still often found myself crafting with words as a technical writer.

Along the way, I dabbled with short poetry, flash fiction, short stories, a novelette, and a novel, and starting a non-fiction book on sustainability. Then in 2007, I discovered and fell in love with screenwriting, which became the focus of my writing life. Well, except for the long poem I published in 2016. And the memoir I ghostwrote in 2017. And the graphic novel project I started in 2019. And that playwriting class. And now this new non-fiction book.

I have a number of projects in various stages, from a short story in need of a publisher, to a couple short films, to feature film scripts, to graphic novels (one based on my published poem).