In Pennsylvania, teachers are required to get their master’s degrees in five years or they get fired.  So, when the time came (almost immediately after I got my first teaching job), I had a choice.  Many teachers go for an education degree.  That didn’t appeal to me.  I was already an educator.  Locally, there were no master’s programs in English left (the University of Scranton got rid of theirs).  I luckily came across an MA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University.  I enrolled, and my life took a wonderful turn for the better.

An MA and MFA in Creative Writing later, I’ve made friendships and connections all over the country with writers and aspiring writers.  Many of the people I got close to were screenwriters and though my focus was both fiction and playwriting, I had and have an intense interest in screenplays and their composition.

A group of friends and I have all collaborated on a television series called Magnolia.  This is based on the life experiences of writer/collaborator/friend Bill Howe.  Also in the mix are James McCabe, a Wilkes-Barrian producer and Joe Bomba, who wrote an awesome and hilarious film about an inept wanna-be serial killer.

Bill was a quarterback for the Chargers very briefly, having gotten injured before the season started.  He played well in college and happened to have been an ambidextrous quarterback.  Bill is white and went briefly to Mississippi Valley State University, a historically black college.  This is the well from which we draw the series.

I won’t belabor this anymore and will let the first two videos we put out speak for themselves.  The first is introductory, the second contains scenes we recently shot (there is a vulgarity, be careful).