David Bouchier will be featured at the Third Friday event at the Reboli Center on Friday, December 15 at 6 PM. Mr. Bouchier is a local celebrity whose commentaries, opinion columns, and radio essays have been entertaining readers and listeners for years. He describes himself as an unapologetic essayist because there are so many peculiar things that cry out for commentary. He will discuss his years on public radio.

David Bouchier was born in London just too late to join the Second World War. He worked initially as a journalist and bookseller in London and as a tour guide in Greece and Turkey. Rather late in life he received a PhD from the London School of Economics and spent two decades teaching at one of Britain’s new universities.

A faculty exchange program in 1979 brought him to Stony Brook where he met and later married Diane Barthel, a professor at the university. In 1986 David moved permanently to the United States and taught for a number of years at Stony Brook University and at Suffolk County Community College in Riverhead.

Apart from teaching he has pursued a lifetime interest in writing. His writings have appeared in dozens of newspapers and in literary and political magazines. His humor column “Out of Order” appeared in the regional Sunday edition of the New York Times for ten years. His Monday essays have been running since 1992 on WSHU Public Radio. He is the host of the podcast “A Few Well-Chosen Words.” He was also the host of a program of classical music and commentary. His two most recent books Not Quite a Stranger and Out of Thin Air (essays) are a collection of stories about life in a French village.