Before launching Balcony’s media relations business in 2006, Jim spent most of his career in journalism. He landed his first newspaper job at the Portland Press-Herald in 1987 and started writing feature stories, eventually for the New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Robb Report and others. After earning a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the acclaimed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he traveled to Vietnam on assignment for Bicycling magazine. In Hue, in 1992, he met a woman whose courtship he chronicled in a memoir, Over the Moat, which was hailed by the Washington Post as an “essential entry
