I’m 71, and have been writing since about age ten. I live in Tacoma with my wife, Melinda, and our three children: Evan, who is 17; Chloe, who is 12; and Isibella, who will be 10 on June 28. Thanks to Kindle, I now have three recent books available on there.
Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches is who we were. That was worth writing, especially because there are few accurate and honest inside accounts of how a religious group was created. We did not need permission or authorization to do that, although I suppose we were touched by the little finger of the Goddess once in a while.
Goddess Murder. My agent friends assured me that it was much too original, did not fit into any of the subgenres of the novel, that no publisher would touch it. And my silly mentors in the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State had told me that one should strive to be as original as possible. How very unrealistic that was—until now. I’m a little sorry to see the legacy publishers going bankrupt because they could not see this revolution coming, but I’m glad their monopoly on publishing has been destroyed.
The earliest material in the novel is from an apocryphal gospel I created in about 1971 out of the fragments of Gnostic writings I could glean from the ten volumes of the Ante-Nicene Fathers I found, with surprise and delight, at Holmes Books at Third and Market in San Francisco, diagonally across from the offices of Scientific American Books, where I was then a manuscript editor. I made a far more sympathetic case for those Gnostics than they had made for themselves.
I later created two more apocryphal gospels, one of Mary Magdalen in the 1980s, then “The Gospel of Diana” about 1991. It was very strange having the voice of a hereditary Italian Witch in the 1870s speaking in my head, telling me things I had not known about religious history. And then all insisted on becoming part of a love story, “A Tale of Love, Witches, and Gnostics,” set in an alternative history. Can you imagine what a genuine interface that could integrate the Craft with a Gnostic sort of Christianity would have to be like? That’s what Diana told me.
My first poem to be published was in 1960, in Transfer, the San Francisco State lit mag. I did not think I had written much poetry over the last 52 years—until I counted, about two years ago, and discovered I have more poems than are in Yeats’ collected poetry. Then I put together Theodyssies and Paradoxologies. I thought up that title many years ago. Unpack it; it tells much about what I explore.
I am also almost finished with Volume One of A Tapestry of Witches. It will cover the first two decades of the history of the Craft in America. I’ve been collecting the materials for that since the 1970s. For more details, you could look at my Wikipedia page. My friends posted it. I wouldn’t have known how to.