Author Biography and Bibliography

I was conceived at Olduvai Gorge.

I have always liked that story because it seems to imply a connection to our hominid ancestors more tangible than that of the genetic information passed from generation to generation for these many thousands of years.

But perhaps all the story really says is that my family traveled a lot overseas. My father is a zoologist, and we would alternate between spending several years abroad and in the States. One of my earliest memories is of my parents carrying armloads of boxes into a small house at Kanha Park in India. Entranced by our surroundings and oblivious to any dangers that might exist, I led my younger brother away from the house along the dirt road toward the wilderness. That such wonderings were not permissible was only brought home to me when my mother came chasing down the road to catch us.

In Tanzania, we lived among an enclave of scientists in the Serengeti, and the water we used came from a holding tank that filled up during the rainy season. I was home-schooled using the Calvert school system, and, because my schooling only took a couple of hours a day, I had many free hours in which to explore. My most vivid memories from that time are not of the great cats, the herds of zebra and wildebeest, but of the animals within my grasp: of trailing a tortoise through a thicket of thorns, of clambering up a large rock to come eyeball to eyeball with an owl, of discovering a caterpillar, longer than my hand and banded black, blue, and red, lying dead in a pool of petrol.

"The Five Cigars of Abu Ali" was inspired in part by a trip taken with my father and brother through northern Pakistan, during a time when restrictions on traveling the Indus Highway were briefly relaxed. In some small way the story also acknowledges the importance that those early travels had in determining the person I became as an adult.

Now I teach in the Biology Department at Dartmouth College, the focus of my work being plant biology. I live in Lebanon, New Hampshire, with my wife, Paulette Werger, a jeweler and metalsmith, where we keep company with two hedgehogs and a turtle.

I have had work published in Nemonymous, The Silver Web, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, and forthcoming Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. My story "The Assistant to Dr. Jacob" was included in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Annual Collection. Other work includes illustrations for Jeff VanderMeer's collection The City of Saints and Madmen.