I grew up on a farm five miles outside a two-stoplight town in the heart of Utah's Uintah Basin, where directions were given by wellheads, fence lines, and stack yards. My father ran his own glass and paint shop in town, worked the family farm in Hancock Cove, and served in every lay church calling on Sundays. My mother kept the farm books and made wedding cakes and dresses. As a boy, I listened from the hallway while adults lowered their voices over layoffs, bad accidents, and quiet marital troubles. Summers were spent trailing friends along irrigation ditches, into cedar and sagebrush-covered hills, and past a shuttered alum mine, where family stories about "how things really happened" never quite matched the official plaques. As an adult, I studied English at Utah State University and spent 30 years in the technology sector on the Wasatch Front. Church meetings and work began to blur together as different rooms where the same arguments about loyalty, livelihood, and truth played out. I now write full-time from my home in Utah County, within easy driving distance of the places that capture my imagination. I share a home kept clean by my lovely wife and enjoy spending time with my four adult children and two grandchildren. My stories grow out of a conviction that landscapes remember what communities try to forget, and that ordinary people, caught between family, faith, and the law, are where the most enduring questions live.