Dirk

I was thirteen when I began writing my first movie script. I had tagged along with my mom to a violin workshop where my brother was learning to play. Amid the sounds of practicing strings in the next room, I sat down with a yellow-lined notepad, wrote Scene One at the top of the page, and started writing.

I had no idea what I was doing. Apparently, that didn’t stop me.

That script became the first step in a career of writing, directing, and producing that spanned nearly three decades. I launched my own production company, worked in television, served as a media director, and eventually freelanced on business and broadcast projects. Along the way, I attended Columbia College Chicago, where I studied screenwriting and motion picture directing, and wrote the screenplay for my first feature, Dream Story.

Over the years, I’ve worked on everything from documentaries and promotional videos to web media and television commercials. I was an early adopter during the emerging digital video era, served on the board of the West Michigan Film-Video Alliance, and taught courses on screenwriting and directing. My work and curiosity have taken me across America and to Europe, Africa, and Israel.

There have been rousing successes, satisfying outcomes, and a few dismal failures. I’m grateful to have spent so much of my life doing creative work I loved—even during those stretches when I wasn’t sure when the next paycheck was coming.

Faith has also been a constant in my life, although my relationship with it has changed considerably. Certitude eventually gave way to questions, and some of life’s harder experiences led me through periods of disillusionment, anger, and doubt. Today, I sometimes describe myself as “a man of faith—with caution.” That tension between belief and uncertainty—and my desire to make some sense of it all—eventually led me into a new season of my creative life.

I wrote a novel.

The Tempest in Glass became the greatest artistic challenge I had undertaken and, ultimately, the creative work of which I’m most proud. It is first and foremost a supernatural thriller, but beneath the story lies something deeply personal: my own struggle to understand prayer, the purposes of God, and the meaning behind some of life’s most confounding circumstances. Writing it became an unexpected journey of emotional release and spiritual evolution.

What has meant even more to me is discovering that the questions behind the story are not mine alone. Readers have connected with its struggles over faith, doubt, loss, unanswered prayer, and the search for meaning when life refuses to provide easy answers.

After a lifetime of telling stories through cameras, scripts, and screens, I’m still telling stories—only now, I’m doing it through the pages of a novel. And if something I write causes someone to wonder, question, feel, or recognize a little of their own journey in mine, then the story has done something worthwhile.