Biography
If you looked up the expression “jack of all trades and master of none” in your book of idioms (everyone has one, right?) you would find my picture there. I have tried my hand at so many jobs I suppose I have forgotten half of them. Rest assured it wasn’t all inability to focus or stick with something. The way I saw it, a writer needs experience if he expects to be able to create realistic fiction. Even if he is writing fantasy. The heart of story-telling is character development; if characters don’t reflect the best and the worst and everything in between of the human condition then readers cannot suspend disbelief and engage with the tale.
No offense to fans of John Grisham or Tom Clancy, but their formulaic, cardboard cutout characters don’t hold a candle to the personalities developed by Saul Bellow, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross), Henry James, Dickens, Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Flaubert, Proust, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Garcia Marquez, DeBernieres, or Pirandello to name just a few of the literary luminaries who have exposed the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the grotesque of the human condition. These and their ilk are the writers I aspired to emulate.
But I digress. I believed the best way to get to know what makes people tick is to associate with as many types as possible. Until later in life I trended toward the blue-collar professions. As a kid I loved to read, but I hated school. College was not a priority, so I worked in restaurants, car washes, landscaping, warehouses, factories, lumber yards, construction projects, tour guide companies. I worked as a lumberjack, fisherman, heavy equipment mechanic, and even as a camp cook on a remote construction project at the most northern point of Alaska. Hey, anybody can stay at a job forever, it takes an expert to continually find another! The point is, all these jobs and the people I met in the course of working them introduced me to myriad types, archetypes if you will, to help me put flesh and bone to my characters.
It was an unfettered life. I owed nothing and owned little for a long time. I have never feared change (although I do fear heights), and while that has not benefitted me much financially, it has made my life interesting. I came and went as I pleased but held onto friendships that have lasted a lifetime. But, as is often our greatest blessing and our downfall as men, I met a woman—I mean, what’s a novel without romance—got married and settled down. Kind of. I got out of my comfort zone and worked various sales jobs from selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door-to-door, to high tech equipment. Then my wife and I both got an itch.
We sold everything, house, cars, furniture, and relocated to Italy for a year. There, culminating ten years of research, I wrote my first novel, Res Publica: The Gift of Mars living in the area near Rome where it all takes place. I learned to speak Italian, met distant cousins with whom we remain close, made lifelong friends, and became a certified Italophile. Upon our return we took up our old lives again, me selling high tech gear and Ren teaching art. We bought another house and cars and furniture. But soon change was again in the wind, and I decided I wanted to do something different.
Another drastic change came to mind, and I enrolled at a local college, got a degree in English and, ironically, became a teacher. A drastic change indeed for someone who hated school. During my first two years of teaching, I earned an MA in Liberal Studies with a concentration in creative writing from Denver University. I taught high school English for twelve years and loved it. As fate would have it, however, I had another novel building in me, so I decided to retire. We moved to Texas and I wrote my second novel a western called No Balm in Gilead.
Have I come to rest? Not sure. I may still have another change or two in me. Whatever the case, I certainly have plenty of stories to dredge up and put on paper.
