Blog Post #2: A Short Bio

Blog Post #2

I was born in East Tennessee and grew up in the Southeast. I trained at the University of Tennessee and would have stayed in Tennessee if my old mentor, Dr. Byrne, had hired me. Jack said "I'm going to do you a favor and not hire you. You should see the world outside of Tennessee." So, I did. I took a job in the Midwest. After a couple of years, I left for a job in New England. The job was attractive to me because it was a liaison position between law enforcement/the courts and the mental health system. I had never been to Maine, so I thought I would give it a try for a few years. I loved it and still do.

I have a PhD in clinical psychology and for most of my professional life I have worked as a therapist, a trainer, and a college instructor. Over the years I've served as a consultant to a host of organizations many in the law enforcement field and even the CIA, very briefly. I returned to Tennessee for 10 years to give back some of what I'd gotten from the state, but Tennessee was changing with the Born Againers and the Right to Lifers taking control of the state. My wife and I made the hard decision to leave the state and return to Maine. We did not want to rear our daughter, who was becoming a young woman, in the environment that was being created.  

I wrote my first novel in Tennessee, Reaching Home, which was an effort to leave Tennessee for the last and final time. I shared the manuscript with a couple of friends who thought it good but needed work. Maggie ran a small publishing company and introduced me to Rita, one of her editors, who helped me put Reaching Home in a form to be published in 2006. Until then most of my writing was nonfiction, psychological evaluations and reports, journal articles. The American Psychological Association's, Michael Shulman, over the years had sent a number of authors and journalists to me who were penning pieces on topics ranging from resilience to self-confidence. I served as their content resource and expert.

In 2009, I was asked to do a blog for Psychology Today entitled “In the Face of Adversity.” During the ten years that I wrote the blog, it focused on resilience. A number of my early blog posts dealt with my mother's death. I continued to write the blog until I came into conflict with a new editor who was more interested in my citing research articles than writing from my 40+ years of experience as a clinical psychologist and a therapist. I have always written about what I know and my own experiences. Much of what I write is autobiographical and most of the places I write about I have lived in or at least visited, underwater cities excluded (The Uninvited Traveler), the Bermuda triangle, the Peruvian Amazon…

After writing Reaching Home, I realized I enjoyed writing fiction and might actually be good at it if I continued to work at it. Finding time to write with a busy practice has always been a challenge. I believe I am a good storyteller. And I'm willing to experiment with different styles of narration and perspective. I republished Reaching Home [2006] and First Night [2014] as Reaching Home at First Light [2023] which combines the two stories. Three Summers, a Fall and One Winter [2021], I wrote during the pandemic for a close friend who was dying of cancer. In 2022, I wrote a short piece of piece of pure science-fiction if there is such a thing, The Uninvited Traveler. I liked the two main characters so much that I am in the process of making the story into a series. The first installment will be published in 2024.

I plan to retire from my clinical practice in a year and focus for the good or the bad on writing. I hope you will enjoy reading my fiction is much as I have enjoyed writing it.

Ron Breazeale