Steven Mayfield was born and raised in Nebraska, a place where people would prefer that you think well of them, should you think of them at all. He is a past recipient of the Mari Sandoz Prize for Fiction and the author of over fifty scientific and literary publications. After a short stint as a sketch writer in Los Angeles, he attended medical school at the University of Nebraska followed by post-graduate training and teaching/research appointments at the University of Iowa, Brown University Program in Medicine, and the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. After moving to Boise in 1989, he served on the clinical faculty of the University of Washington School of Medicine and was Managing Partner and Director of Education for Mountain States Neonatology Associates as well as the Director of the High Risk Follow-up Clinic for St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center and Co-Founder/Medical Director of the Parent Support Group. He served on the National Medical Advisory Committee for the Magella Group from 1999-2001 and was founder and director of the Neonatal Follow-up Clinic for St. Alphonsus Hospital in 2003.
After a hiatus away from creative writing that lasted almost twenty years — during which he published forty-two scientific articles, abstracts, chapters, and reviews — Steven returned to fiction in 1993. In 1994, his stories began to appear in print and have been published by Event, The Black River Review, cold-drill, artisan, The Long Story, and the anthology From Eulogy to Joy. In 1998, he was the guest editor for Cabin Fever, the literary journal of the Cabin Literary Center. He retired from medicine in 2004 and spent three years working as a free-lance editor before publishing Howling at the Moon, a Best Books of 2010 selection by USA Book News as well as an Eddie Hoffer Finalist.
Steven doesn’t care for the look of his own navel and refuses to gaze into it when writing. He believes that a writer should keep readers firmly attached to the narrator’s hip and not waste their time, that it’s possible to forward a serious point without making the reader feel wretched, and that the simple declarative sentence is often more elegant than a florid metaphor. He also believes that dogs are superior to humans because their only real goal is to be good, that baseball is the best game in the world, and that coffee and donuts are absolute proof that a superior intelligence oversees the universe.
Steven currently resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Pam, and a pair of Goldendoodles who can be annoyingly insistent around meal-time. He and Pam share five grown children. He can order beer in four languages. His wife can say, “Pay no attention to this man” in five.
Regal House Publishing is delighted to bring you Steven Mayfield’s work of fiction, Treasure of the Blue Whale, in the spring of 2020.
