James Stark
I live and write in the Pacific Northwest corner of the US which also often serves as the backdrop for my stories and home for my characters. I received my education in Oregon and Washington, where I received my first driver's license, was inducted into the military during the often turbulent sixties, was married, raised two sons, taught and retired.
The German poet, Goethe, claimed that everything he wrote was part of a grand confession. In short, you write what you know. My stories deal with men and women as their individual lives come up against the larger issues of the time and place they inhabit.
My characters survive the natural phenomena of floods and ice storms and are changed by them as well as by war and political upheavals. They are minor players on the world stage of events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but their stories demonstrate how those phenomena reach down and bring drama and tension into the everyday lives of people we see on our streets and in our neighborhoods.
Generally these fictional accounts represent a generous borrowing from things that have happened to me or to people I know. As in real life, not every ending is a happy one.
Del Robinson and John Bolt as well as Bob Davis are veterans of the war in Vietnam, as am I. My responses to that experience don't match theirs, but I am familiar with others whose stories are similar. Like Billy and Davey I experienced flood and ice storms and the fear and even prejudice that accompanied those natural disasters. But my story differs from theirs.
Just as Karl and Bertram participated in the Cold War as it was played out on the East-West German border during the final decades of the twentieth century, I too, lived through the East-West conflict and have the dubious distinction of an East German State Security file as a western traveler in the Communist East after the Berlin Wall was erected.
In the past, during the post-war 1940s and '50s, as well as in the present, a lot of young boys acted as "man of the family". I count myself among them, but my story diverges from Billy's or Davey's or even Johnny's in Woodfiber Dreams. My mother worked as "Rosy the Riveter", building ships during WWII, and her marriage to a soldier also ended with the peace. But her story differs from the mother in Collateral Damage.
My stories combine imagination with a dollop of reality to provide insights into the time, the places and people whose experiences I observed or shared, and which I would like to share with readers.
