I barely got out of high school. At eighteen I’d have told you that people like me don’t write books. I was wrong, and I took my time finding out.
I grew up almost illiterate. In the fifth grade my mother took us to a show, and at the concession stand she asked what I wanted. I couldn’t read the board. I told her, in front of everyone, that I didn’t know what I could have.
She found a tutor. Five dollars an hour, which we did not have, with my father away in Vietnam.
I learned to read. Treasure Island. Black Beauty. In high school a friend lent me The Hobbit, and that changed the shape of the world.
I served on submarines. Then I taught computer science to submariners, and after that I spent the better part of fifty years in information technology. Somewhere in there I studied at a Norbertine seminary.
None of that is a writing career. But a submarine is a very good place to think.
A patrol is mostly waiting. You stand your watch, you go where you’re sent, you stay there, and nothing happens — and the fact that nothing happened is the whole of what you were for. Nobody thanks you. Nobody knows. That leaves a great many hours, and I filled mine with stories I never expected to write down.
I’m writing them down now, because I finally can, and because I’d like to leave my family something of mine to keep.
I never stopped reading theology, either — the desert fathers, Enoch, the Gnostics, the hermetic books, the Zohar. I’m still Orthodox. Both of those facts are in the books.
The things in my novels that are not people came out of that reading. It’s no secret, and I’d rather you found it than had it explained.
My novels are about memory — what it holds, what it’s owed, and what happens to the people standing near it. Pilot Light is set in the Florida Keys. The Sourwood Books are set in the North Carolina mountains my family came from.
They’re about ordinary people. Nobody in them is chosen or gifted. They’re people who couldn’t leave a thing alone.
I live with my wife Mimi and a miniature Australian Shepherd named Pippa, who is in the books under a different name and knows it.