About David Yarian, Ph.D.

David fell in love with words as a child, listening to stories of "the old days" told by his grandparents. He was a voracious reader -- books on Marco Polo, hidden islands, mysteries solved by the Hardy boys and the inventions of Tom Swift. The majestic rhythms of the King James Bible resonated through his childhood, and the words of hymns were his first introduction to poetry.

He went to college intending to become an engineer, but what captured him were the words he heard in his liberal arts classes: the sonorous rhythms of German; the epic poetry of the Odyssey and the Iliad; the soaring language of Dante, Joyce and Faulkner; and the history lectures from gifted and erudite professors.

After graduate school in Psychology, David entered into private practice as a psychotherapist. For over 25 years he has been sitting with his clients as they talk of their lives - their feelings, their hopes, their dreams, doubts and disappointments. The work of reflecting back an accurate description of complex emotions and experiences and inviting deeper exploration has led him on another journey with language. He has come to see the power of metaphor to communicate multiple layers of meaning and unlock the potential of new experience.

"Though I have always been a reader, I never really imagined myself as a writer," David says. "Discovering literary fiction in college changed my life, though I didn't realize it for a long time. I just knew that I loved to enter the alternative universes created for me by serious writers -- populated by quirky characters who were grappling with the absurd and improbable world in which they found themselves." David is now working on a novel, and exploring other avenues for expressing his lifelong love affair with language.