We understand, even create, the world around us through our stories. I’m grateful that storytelling is at the heart of my job.
I’m Dave Norman, an author in Portland, Maine. I began writing commercially in 2000, and since then have written for a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and websites. As a teenager I developed my own human interest beat for the Clarion, my hometown newspaper. During college at Westminster in Fulton, Missouri, I parlayed my newspaper writing into covering sporting news for “Action Pursuit Games” magazine and “Paintball Magazine.”
That work lead to visiting 24 countries and 48 states, hitchhiking into natural disaster areas, riding the railroads from Beijing, China, to Munich, Germany, and otherwise having a helluva good time researching articles (and eventually books) while I should have been doing something more lucrative.
When the paintball magazines folded, I was offered the editorship of several law enforcement and tactical magazines owned by Beckett Media. I learned how to serve as a magazine editor through that experience, which helped me develop a newsstand publication for Harris Publications that lasted one issue before their entire company folded.
I’ve settled from my freelance writing and traveling days, into a comfortable suburban life with three young children and a wonderful wife. While I’ve let go of the traveling, hobbies, and lower paying work I embraced before settling down, one thing remains constant: my love of writing, and telling stories…whether as fiction or narrative nonfiction.
I’m fortunate to participate in storytelling, fact finding, and perspective sharing as my livelihood. I love using my research to meet interesting people with fantastic stories of their own…whether that makes it into my narrative nonfiction, or into fiction like “Hash 207.”