I grew up on the north shore of Chicago, and went to Beloit College.  After college I spent two years in  New York City working as an editorial assistant at a small book packager. Although I discovered that New York was not the place for me, I gained valuable experience working on cookbooks including the first three volumes of the The Best of Gourmet as well as children’s books like A Day in the Life of a Horse Trainer.

After leaving New York, I spent time in Taiwan where I taught English, and lived with my best girlfriend from college and her husband, Emil Chau. Then after a season guiding rafts at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, I moved to Telluride and spent three years skiing, and working as an editorial jill-of-all-trades for Western Eye Press.

Although I was heartbroken to leave a place as beautiful as Telluride, the Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Davis was my next home. At Davis I began working on Place Last Seen, and had the chance to work with writers as diverse as Gary Snyder, Elizabeth Tallent, and Tom Jenks. I also helped organize the first two years of the Art of the Wild Summer Writers Workshop where I worked with Louis Owens, James Houston and Gretel Ehrlich. After earning my MA from UC Davis, I headed back to the Rockies where I did my PhD in the Creative Writing program at the University of Utah.

While I loved teaching, after earning my PhD I decided it was time to find a job that might allow me to pay off the debt I’d accumulated during eight years in academia, so I headed back out to the Bay Area where I was hired by Cisco Systems.

I spent nearly a decade at Cisco where I worked as a technical editor, technical writer, and localization coordinator. In 2002, I became a full-time telecommuter and moved to Livingston, where I bought a 100-year old house and made sure it was wired for high-speed DSL. I remained at Cisco until the summer of 2009 when I was laid off in a restructuring, and finally had the opportunity to write full time.

In 2000 Picador USA published Place Last Seen, my first novel (which was also my dissertation). I am currently working on a new novel, as well as a screenplay of Place Last Seen.

I have been blogging since 2002 at  LivingSmall, where I cover topics as diverse as farm politics, sustainable living, cooking, gardening, raising backyard chickens and the many advantages of extricating one’s life from the clutches of consumerism.

You can contact me directly at cmf406 at gmail dot com