what could only be witnessed. For a time, I held leadership roles in major medical institutions and helped build the field of neuropsychiatry itself.

Those years matter. They shaped how I understand fear—not as weakness, but as information. Not something to eliminate, but something to listen to. I learned that resilience is rarely dramatic. It is quiet. It is cumulative. It is built through small acts of honesty repeated over time.

When our three-year-old son developed leukemia, endurance and fortitude were no longer abstractions. During the long course of treatment, I told eight stories—night after night—in serialized sequence to him and his older brother. The stories were not meant to reassure or distract, but to steady them. They were told to harden him gently against the ordeal ahead, to give fear shape, language, and limits while an adult voice remained close.

Leadership, I learned, is not the absence of fear. It is the willingness to remain present within it. Courage is not bravado; it is endurance with integrity. And generativity—the work of passing something meaningful forward—becomes essential when survival is no longer theoretical.

Eventually, medicine no longer felt like the right language.

In 2010, I stepped away from clinical work to write. I discovered that stories can hold what medicine often cannot—especially the fears children carry and adults forget how to name. Stories allow fear to be approached indirectly. They give it distance, rhythm, and sometimes humour. They invite self-understanding without instruction.

I write in a cedar cabin on Bois Blanc Island, looking out at water that has witnessed more than it explains. I also spend time in Santa Fe, where my wife Lynn and I live closer to our sons and our family.

Bedtime Stories to Terrify Children came from that time. These are not stories designed to shock or frighten for effect. They sit beside fear instead of denying it. Any medical knowledge within them is woven quietly into the fabric—not announced, not instructional. What remains is what mattered most to me as a parent, and now as a writer: presence, honesty, and the belief that fear, when shared, loses its power to isolate.

Before all of this—and underneath all of it—I was a father who told stories.

And I still believe that the most enduring lessons are not taught head-on, but carried gently, at night, in a familiar voice, when the world is quiet enough to listen.