New Book

The road on the cover of my memoir, Rise & Climb: Finding Purpose Through Pain, is Morrill Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The person walking down it is me. The redwoods still bear the scars of the Lexington Fire, but now soar high into the forest canopy. I feel connected to their strength. We all survived the fire, and we’re still growing.

I grew up on Morrill Road, where my parents still live today. In 1985, we lost our home to the Lexington Fire. My family rebuilt, only to lose our home again in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Even that didn’t stop us—we always bounced back.

I carry that strength and determination through life. Difficult things will happen, but we get to choose how we respond. Our experiences in the mountains shaped the philosophy that stays with me today: there is fuel within the struggle. I’ve worked to turn that fuel into something meaningful.

Rise & Climb is about loss, fatherhood, music, and finding a way forward when your life has drifted far from the person you hoped to become. At 28, I barely recognized myself. Moving forward required a commitment to small, repeated actions: getting better at the things that mattered, and letting go of the things that pulled me away from them.

That process became the foundation of my book. Music runs throughout the story. As a recording artist, I wrote songs during different chapters of my life, often while I was still trying to understand what I was experiencing. Those songs helped shape the memoir. For the audiobook, I narrated the story myself