I’ve been writing and editing for four decades.
Some things I’ve done:
I edited New York Times Bestseller David Goggins’ books Can’t Hurt Me and Never Finished.
I developed multiple Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestsellers, including Joe Mechlinski’s Shift the Work and Krister Ungerböck’s 22 Talk Shifts
I edited books reviewed by the New York Times, including Ginger Strand’s Killer on the Road and Inventing Niagara and James Prosek’s Eels
I wrote the forthcoming Blackout Punch, about the fastest-growing, most notorious beverage in America.
My areas of interest are:
Memoir
Business
Business memoir
Entrepreneurship
Personal development
Sports
Current affairs
Natural history
Personal finance
I've written three published nonfiction books under my own name. I know what it's like to live and breathe a subject for months or years. I’ve helped hundreds of authors through that process.
Until early 2023 I was the editor in chief at Scribe Media, an independent publishing company. I left that to launch my own ghostwriting, editing and publishing company, Hal Clifford Associates. Previously, I was the executive editor at Orion magazine, where a story I edited was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Best Essay. Other pieces I edited were included in Best American Science and Nature Writing.
During my tenure, Orion won the Utne General Excellence Award. I worked with Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Rebecca Solnit, Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben and dozens of other talented writers, known and unknown.
I moved to Colorado almost by accident after graduating from Dartmouth College with a major in English literature and a minor in Environmental policy. Soon I was accepted to business school. Instead of attending, I hitchhiked around the South Pacific for a year, where I wrote travel stories on borrowed typewriters and mailed them Par Avion to newspaper editors—all of whom, beneficently, published what I sent. I was hooked on words.
Returning to Aspen, I became a newspaperman-ski bum. I met my wife there, striking up a conversation about bad poetry. We have a teenage son and a daughter in college. At the dinner table, we laugh a lot, because laughter is one of the great currencies of abundance, and I am a great believer in the power of abundant thinking and the superpower of gratitude.
After spending most of my adult life in Colorado, in 2021 I moved with my family to the coast of South Carolina. Mountains are awesome. So is ocean. Now I live 400 yards from an estuary rich with roseate spoonbills, wood storks and great egrets. Here I intend to get good at flyfishing for redfish, stand-up paddling, and (maybe someday) kite-surfing.
I love traversing mountains, cooking Italian food for people I like, dogs of all flavors, jigsaw puzzles, natural history, American history, biathlon, skeet shooting, flyfishing, just about any book I can lay my hands on, yoga, and birdwatching. Sometimes I even try to write not-bad poetry.