All my academic work has been in literature and music.  At the age of 18, I set out to study “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”  I wrote my master’s thesis on Charles Dickens, whose best-selling novels crusaded for social causes in industrial England.  So powerful was his art that the people most challenged by his message continued to buy his books. And real change happened.

I finished my degrees, fell in love, and asked my wife (now of 41 years) to marry me.  She helped me decide to delay my plan of living in a garret in Paris while writing the Great American Novel.

I became Chief Speech-Writer for The Coca-Cola Company, then was lured away to be Creative Director in a production company that specialized in corporate communications and marketing.  We promoted the very first personal computer, the IBM PC XT, staged the inaugural shareholder meeting for BellSouth, and motivated sales forces at large conventions. I once used the Greek myth of Prometheus the Fire-Bringer to promote a high-tech cigarette lighter for Scripto.  It was fun work.

And then, Egleston Children’s Hospital hired our firm to keynote the largest non-profit capital campaign in Atlanta up to that time.  I spent a full week there, interviewing the children and their parents, doctors, nurses, chaplains, and social workers, and it changed my life.  I left my partnership in 1991 to form Living Stories and began devoting most of my energy to non-profit causes.

Egleston merged with Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital, later with Hughes Spalding Children’s Hospital, and Living Stories produced keynote films for the capital campaigns that helped build Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.  In the hospital rooms and homes of these families, I discovered my calling and learned my craft.

I know from long experience that people can be influenced and inspired in honest and authentic ways.  They will support causes and companies they believe in. The people in our films help them to believe.