About Twainman

 See my Member Profile

My identity has taken a huge shift in the past year, because I left Louisiana just a month before Katrina smashed New Orleans and Rita wiped out most of the coastal towns between Lafayette and Port Arthur, Texas.  You don't hear much about the Rita victims, because the country folks just shut up and work together to get their lives back without getting any network airtime or newspaper headlines.

I always wanted to be a writer and I loved working for universities, but most of my life was in schools from 7th through 12th grade, teaching science.  Evenings I spent 20 years teaching for the University of Maryland and other schools as an adjunct English and public speaking lecturer,   I had the good fortune of being coordinator for the LSU/NSF Physical Science Grant to give Louisiana science teachers a good foundation in physics and chemnistry after I retired from the DoDDS US schools at military bases in Germany in 1995.  I had an Achilles tendon repair in December 2003, and for a while was in a wheelchair.  Then I had sixteen months of various physical therapy treatments.  When I was invited to be a guest professor of educational leadership and instructional design in Bangkok,  I caught the next flight out of my Louisiana hometown and began my new life in Southeast Asia, where I moved very rapidly from the Faculty of Education to the Office of the President, becoming one of several editors the president employs.  I edit a variety of learned papers, publications, announcements, wrote poems and songs and brochures, and help students with their masters' and doctoral research and writing. 

I met and fell in love with a beautiful Cambodian graduate student, and we married in April, 2006, just before she enrolled for her last two years of school.  She's a PhD student in Philosophy.  We make a great working/writing/researching team, and I enjoy the guest lecturers who speak to her department each month.  All in all, it is a wonderful life, and we are both very excited about her work and mine.

TWAINMAN

Location:

Thailand

Primary occupation:

editor of print and web publications

Dream occupation:

Exactly what I'm doing

Hometown:

New Iberia, Louisiana, USA

Schools attended:

5 degrees and maybe 30 or so colleges. NYU, College of Santa Fe, St. Mary's U of Texas, Tulane, Georgetown, U. of New Orleans, Northwestern, Loyola New Orleans, USC, UC Davis, Arizona State . . . .

I like:

writing and singing, playing guitar, doing science, being in Bangkok

Favorite writers:

Melville, James Lee Burke, Norbert Krapf, poet (see google.com)

Favorite books:

All Krapf's books; the Burke "Dave Robicheaux" mysteries, Asimov non-fiction, Feynman

Favorite newspapers:

Bangkok Post

Favorite magazines:

Science Scope

Favorite music:

Old New Orleans funk, Dr. John, Professor Longhair; Zydeco. Mozart, Beethoven

Favorite movies:

Reggio's Quasi Trilogy (google.com) old Frankenstein, Dracula Sucks, Steve Martin classics, Keaton, Chaplain

Favorite TV shows:

none

Favorite teams:

LSU Tigers in football, girls track and field, swimming, baseball, basketball

Favorite quote:

"Knock and it shall be opened, seek, and you shall find."

Gender:

Male

Religion:

Do more, attend less