about
It took me, Paul Raymond Reid, a while to call myself a writer—to think of myself primarily as someone who writes.
I had to get past a career in computers—something I was good at but did not love. I had to get past an attempt to be straight—from which I have two lovely daughters and an extended brood of a family. I had to think myself past the turmoil of aging while gay—while having the best of husbands to show the way.
I just had to write and commit myself to let go and publish mysteries, opera libretti, poems, plays. I didn't really have a choice. I'm a writer. Here are a few tokens as signposts.
Sample one or both of my two mysteries: Walt Whitman and the Phrenology of Murder. and Another Book of Mormons. Read my play about the American modernist painter Marsden Hartley, Hanging Pictures. Look this year for my first opera libretto, Beckford. I write poems whenever writing them is unavoidable.
Read my poem, "Passing Tokens".
I live in Hartford, New York City, and Palm Springs. My loving husband, Tom Hartnett, tries to keep me organized. My two daughters, Kirsten and Erin, and their husbands play traffic cops for a brood of eight grandchildren. All of us rented an Irish Castle this summer.
