I am from a small town in the Upper Cumberland region of Tennessee called Sparta. My family has lived in the region for generations. I have wandered a bit, but the soil of these mountains is mixed with my blood and it keeps calling me back. Mine was a typical Tennessee upbringing �my grandfather had served a prison stretch in the �40s for running moonshine, my adult relatives were still (quite vocally) insulted that their ancestors lost the Civil War, and my time outside was spent perched in a tree deep in the woods or riding ponies with my older cousins.

I have loved books since I was small �before I could read I still loved to look at them. I started with comic books, as most boys do. Mixed in with the Spider-man and Batman was a healthy amount of western titles such as "Rawhide Kid" and "Jonah Hex". I had read all of Shakespeare�s plays and a translation of the Odyssey before I reached middle school, but it was perhaps prophetic that my first "grown-up" novel was Elmer Kelton�s western Bowie�s Mine, when I was eight years old. I have always written.

When I was a teenager �wanting to help change the world, as youths are wont to do �I began to spend most of my time with religious pursuits. I served for years as a full-time minister, and spent time in Florida and New York City working with Haitian immigrants. As I grew older my thoughts on the subject changed �as adults are wont to do �and I have abjured organized religion. This does not mean in the least that I am critical of anyone else�s choices in the matter.

I began to seriously pursue writing when I was nineteen years old. I had a part-time job buffing the floors at a K-mart. Three times a week they would lock me in overnight �about eleven hours �and the job only took three of four hours. After a few weeks of this I was bored out of my skull. I read every book on the shelves which interested me (without paying for the privilege, apologies to my writer friends whom I was unwittingly depriving of royalties!). Eventually there were no books left to read, and I had no choice but to write my own. I found it to be like a powerful drug. Once it was in my system it became a part of me and I have never been able to do without it since.

Like most writers I produced several early manuscripts (in many genres) that will never be publishable �and must now be chalked up as part of the learning process. In 1995 my first short story was accepted by Louis L�Amour Western Magazine, and I was published in magazines on a fairly regular basis in the following years. All but one of these have been westerns. The single exception was "Amber", which was a fantasy story. I consider it a great honor to be a member of Western Writers of America, an organization I have been well aware of since I was young. Another great honor I�ve had is to interview Stan Lee, whose innovative use of characterization and social relevance in comic books (unheard of at the time!) helped set a young boy on the road to literary pursuit. Another treasured honor I have is to be included in an informal group of about two dozen Western writers called The Campfire, which includes several of my literary heroes.

I started college in the fall of 2000, at the tender young age of 32. I earned my B.A. in History (with a minor in English) at Tennessee Tech in 2004. I had the honor of teaching an extended-education creative writing class while at Tech. Beginning in the fall of 2005 I will be attending the University of Illinois in Champaign, working toward a doctorate in Native American Studies. I have a lovely, brilliant daughter named Bethany, born in 1991, who is the light of my life- as a teenager, she is of course embarrassed by my every move!

I will close with some of my favorite quotes. From Oakley Hall (author of the classic western novel Warlock): "The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction." From Elmer Kelton (paraphrased, as I can't find the exact quote): "I don't write about a good guy in a white hat versus a bad guy in a black hat- I write about two guys in gray hats, one trying to institute change and the other resisting it." And from myself: "I don't write about things that happen to people- I write about people that things happen to."