Born in Minnesota, grew up in Missouri, specifically St. Louis. Public school through the twelfth grade, playing soccer, tennis and other sports. Started chess clubs in both middle school and high school.
At eighteen I realized my California dream, with my undergraduate years at Stanford, including two years of tennis there. I lettered but I can confidently state that you have never read about me in the sports pages.
Next came med school back at University of Missouri at Columbia, then residency at UC San Francisco. I should note that I began my first public speaking while still in residency, giving a talk on nuclear power.
Two weeks after graduating I started teaching full-time in a UC Davis-affiliated family medicine residency, with much of my practice focused on infectious disease and obstetrics. Taught full-time for 16 years, with my main academic appointment at UC Davis, but coming full circle a community faculty appointment at Stanford Med Center as well.
I lost my heart in San Francisco several times, but was fortunate to marry the prime plumb. Barbara is a certified nurse-midwife, and between the two of us we delivered about 7,000 babies and had three of our own, all graduated, married and two of them with a couple of grandsons apiece.
We moved up to Bellingham, Washington 26 years ago, with the second half of my career comprising a combination of primary and urgent care, but we are now both retired. In the last ten years I have lectured pretty widely, including several seminar series at Western Washington University, and many other venues including at conferences in Idaho and Oregon. But I have been no longer teaching medicine, rather about energy systems, the climate system and the electric grid, and this set of a dozen or more two-hour seminars forms the basis for half of the chapters in my three books.
Barb has made certain that we indulged in a fair amount of travel. My Spanish is serviceable, having worked the summer just before med school in Guatemala. I have traveled in Mexico and Central America a number of times, also Europe severally. Our biggest trip included biking in Berlin, Copenhagen and Oslo, then a two-week cruise to Svalbard, Greenland and Iceland. Hiking, kayaking and a true polar plunge well north of the Arctic Circle while in Greenland. I have pledged that my 2015 trip to the Arctic will be my last long-distance trip. We do have a geothermal conference coming up in El Salvador next month, and will at some point get to Puerto Rico to tour their electric grid.
My only prior writing experience has been medical or technical pieces, not really relevant to my climate fiction manuscripts. But one of the two main characters is a physician, and there is significant and pertinent medical and epidemiological discussion in several key chapters.
My final writing qualification is that my wife and I ran Axton Road Inn out of our home for eight years in Washington State, beginning while we were still in practice and continuing through early in retirement. Some actual anecdotes have made their way into the manuscripts.
