One day as I was hitching through a dusty corner of Wyoming, I was picked up by a carload of hard, coarse men who led me to believe they meant to murder me and leave me in the Utah desert, probably raping the daylights out of me first. They didn’t. They were phosphate miners having some “fun” on their way to work. But as I was considering my situation, I promised myself that if I survived, I would write a novel every few years – and make it a good one.
In time, the hitchhiking account found its way into Rosebud. But first I graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and set out to find a position as a pastor to bright and eager students. Failing that, I married my girlfriend and took a temporary job (in that order) with the Washington State welfare department. Ten years later and working on my first novel – the autobiographical one – I accepted a promotion to the Department of Corrections and was off to the races.
I never finished that first novel, but my wife and I rebuilt our house and raised two sons, I lost my wife, and finally, after the hardest period of my life, I published my first finished novel, Chance: An Existential Horse Opera.
In my life I’ve been a backcountry fire fighter and mountain lookout – a story from that appeared much later in the North Dakota Quarterly; a New York City youth worker; a Master of Divinity (which I still am, though the term is an oxymoron); a Probation and Parole Officer; Novelist-in-Residence at Seattle’s legendary Blue Moon Tavern – an honor I shared for a sweet time with Tom Robbins and where Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke once toasted the muse; an honorary leprechaun; an avid backpacker; and a writer of stories and novels.
My prose and poetry have appeared in various fine journals and at HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington State history. That first finished novel, the existential horse opera, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. The new one, forthcoming from Regal House, is no horse opera. You’ll see.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you James Knisely’s The Black Bookends in 2028.
