The Backstory

The story began in a post-apocalyptic Appalachian town when a butcher’s daughter brought her newborn baby boy to her mobile home in the woods.

No, this is not a Hunger Games rip-off.

That was April 1984, when Chris made his entrance into the world. And in that post-apocalyptic town Chris would live his childhood, watching previously orange rivers turn clear again, memorizing dinosaur species and becoming a true believer in the subtle magic of books.

You see, his father was the son of a coal miner who had an absurdly large library for someone in his line of work. Chris’s dad read his father’s library and built upon it, leaving it all in plain sight to stoke Chris’s curiosity. Everything was there; from Aristotle to Zizek, astronomy to zoology, Aldous Huxley to Tolkien and Verne. Chris took them to school to read since the prescribed lessons were boring by comparison. That didn’t always work out well. But it did pan out in one important way–it was clear he wouldn’t be another coal miner.

In steel-milling coal-mining towns, when industries leave for greener pastures, parents know their children will have to leave to find opportunity. Chris’s dad, aware that the town’s apocalypse had already occurred, told stories from his time as a traveling folk musician to feed Chris’s growing sense of adventure. “Go far.” he’d often say, slapping his bony son on the back.

Heeding his advice, Chris went to college a whole 33 miles away. After he stayed up late playing video games the night before the SAT and was waitlisted by his preferred schools, he matriculated to St. Vincent College in Latrobe, PA based on some cool trees (European larches ARE beautiful, especially in fall) and old architecture (he would later learn that it was neo-Romanesque). His mother blamed punk rock, but Chris knew it was his own fault. It turned out to be one of the best turns his life took.

St. Vincent College is a small liberal arts school operated by Benedictine monks. As Chris fraternized with his cloaked professors, he felt like he was part of a tradition that stretched back to the Middle Ages. In fact, as he leafed the fragile, yellowed pages of philosophers’ tomes in St. Vincent’s sub-stacks and crypt, sometimes he forgot that centuries had passed since Alcuin the Great helped build Charlemagne’s library. The dance parties in Alcuin Hall reminded him otherwise.

As a junior a biology major with an anthropology minor, things took a turn. Chris was unexpectedly rejected from all of the biology internships for which he applied. Chris was terrified of returning to the welding shop for another summer, so an anthropology professor pulled some strings. Chris was soon on a plane to Zambia to study yellow baboons and lead walking safaris in Kafue National Park.

The humans working at the safari camp proved themselves to be more interesting than the monkeys, and when Chris returned to St. Vincent he majored in anthropology and sought to pursue it in graduate school.

The first time attempting an anthropology Ph.D. didn’t go so well–and that’s an understatement. It was an unmitigated shambles. Chris returned to his Appalachian hometown with no scholarship, no money, no leads and an uncertain future. People who had been life-long cheerleaders put away their pom-poms.

After working for a year in Washington, DC (and getting engaged to a woman romantic enough to accept a proposal from an unemployed dropout), Chris reapplied to anthropology graduate school. Because if something didn’t work, wasted time, cost money and caused suffering, do it again. Right?

He matriculated to University of Pennsylvania in 2008 to study reproductive ecology among hunter-gathers. After a summer spent in Formosa, Argentina in a Toba-Qom village, he switched foci to substance use and the economy, because collecting saliva samples from a population concerned that he would perform sympathetic witchcraft on the bodily fluids he collected was just too awkward for him. He was very attached to his new Qom friends, and the new study–on substance use–would be more useful to the community.

The next summer he was back in the Qom homelands, and at the behest of his undergraduate anthropology professor, he set non-fiction aside and brought some novels to read. The Brothers Karamazov and the The Lord of the Rings. And as he sat for days at the end of a dirt road near the conjunction of Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay, waiting to hitch a ride on the back of a bean truck intended for migrant workers, Gandalf’s words jumped off the page. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you might be swept off to.” From where he was sitting, it was truer than any work of non-fiction he’d ever read. He’d finally gone far–or at least more than 33 miles this time. How he came to the other end of such a long road was beyond him entirely.

After 15 months of fieldwork, Chris returned home and started writing his first book. He painfully discovered that it could not be put off and then written in two days like most term papers. Despite growing to utterly despise writing, he finished the job and successfully defended his dissertation in 2015.

But by then, there were no professor jobs. What had been a decent job market prior to the 2008 crisis was now another post-apocalyptic wasteland. After considering becoming a gardener, musician, homemaker or thunder-dome contestant he found his niche as an ethnographer studying the ways technology fits in people’s daily lives. He took a job on a service design team. Then a user experience (UX) team. Eventually, people stopped asking what he was going to do with his anthropology degree.

This road led to Google, and brings us nearly to the present. If you’re wondering how a Bronze Age fantasy novel came out of this, you can join Chris in his continued surprise. Stay tuned for a blog on how a fantasy novel became something he wanted to attempt…