At the beginning of his Divine Comedy Dante announces that he is “midway through the course my life” when the “dark wood,” the complexities of adulthood overtake. Sometimes there is joy or discovery, other times terrible sadness and destruction.
As child I read books almost entirely of the magical or imagined historical sort. The Oz books by L. Frank Baum were a mainstay as was a wonderfully old copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology. Narnia, Middle Earth, Pern, Gethen, Anarres, Earthsea . . . all came much later. For me the universe of imagination was filled with early 20th-century and ancient classic mythologies.
A critical moment for me was when I was 10 years old. In the space of 12 months 4 things happened that literally restructured my imagination. I asked an older sibling for something “new and different” to read. They handed me a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury titled R is for Rocket. I saw Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The original series of Star Trek premiered; my first episode was “The Menagerie.” And in 1967 astronauts Virgil Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White were killed in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire.
These books and stories, these images, and the sense that space travel and space colonization were deadly and wondrous endeavors rooted my storyteller’s mind in science fiction and magical realism.
WRITING PROJECTS IN PROCESS
FICTION
A speculative science fiction novel (with mystery and archival elements) about competing factions of socio-anthropologists facing permanent isolation and the necessity of co-existence following an interplanetary system calamity. The cast of characters includes queer and ASD persons and two interdependent, non-human sentient species.
A collection of short stories, poems, and illustrations on the nature of the Muse.
A magical realism illustrated book about a synesthesic young person who meets a one-eyed peer with rather unusual abilities.
NONFICTION
Two research articles on material culture and design in utopian fiction and speculative world building.