AUTHOR BIO I'm an Arizona native whose roots go back to colonial Virginia, where my ancestors taught at the College of William and Mary before the American Revolution (they fought for the Americans). Now my wife Jena and I live and write on the North Coast of California. I come to fiction writing from a varied background. Trained at various times as a carpenter, a soldier, a musician, a teacher, and a writer, I bring a little each to my novels. One Native-American and two European languages add to the mix. Undergraduate majors in English and social studies, a graduate degree in linguistics, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing further shape my writing. I taught school for a decade in the Arizona canyon lands, where modern life collides uneasily with mysterious geography and the alternate world perceptions of very diverse cultures. There I learned that differing beliefs construct differing realities--just as disbelief fabricates impossibility. Thus one person's disbelief makes another person's reality seem impossible. The characters in my stories are constantly relearning this truth as they collide with each other's lives.