ABOUT
JON
Thanks for clicking around my website. If you’re here, that means you want to know a little about me and how that informs my writing.
My background is diverse, geographically speaking. It extends from coast to coast and north to south. I grew up in what is now Silicon Valley.
Back then it was a magnet for aerospace engineers at Stanford, Lockheed Martin, and NASA, where my dad calculated satellite orbits on a slide rule.
I preferred to read novels and biographies over solving quadratic equations and fantasized about traveling around the world, just not in a space ship.
Dad’s family is from Arkansas. Thinking there was no future in Bentonville, he moved to California. If only he’d stayed and started working for Walmart, I figure I could be living on a Caribbean island right now.
Mom’s family is from Iowa, but her father ran away from home to join the Spanish-American War in 1898. After returning from the Philippines, he settled down in California. Granddad went to work, saved up, and bought some farmland near San Francisco. That land is now the corporate headquarters of Google.
If only Granddad hadn’t sold his farm so cheaply way back when, I could be living on a Caribbean island right now.
I earned my undergraduate degree in mathematics and economics from the University of Iowa. I’m guessing some of dad’s aptitude for slide rules must have rubbed off. I also learned firsthand how inhumanly cold 20-degrees below zero is.
But there were compensations. My campus job was at a women’s dormitory, preparing meals for its 2,000 residents and keeping my dating calendar full. It was at the mashed potato machine where I met my future wife. Instead of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze at a pottery wheel, picture Linda and Jon mixing 50-pounds of potatoes.
After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, I moved with my new wife, our dog Yogurt, and all our worldly possessions packed in a 5x8 U-Haul trailer to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to begin graduate studies.
During the Vietnam era, I left school to serve in the U.S. Army rising to the rank of Captain and serving on bases in Kansas, Indiana, and North Carolina. Following military service, I returned to Chapel Hill and earned a master’s degree in economics from UNC.
My first vocation was in health care where I consulted with hospitals from Baltimore to Baton Rouge. Following twenty-plus years of writing feasibility studies accompanied by appendices full of spreadsheets, I felt the call to ordained ministry.
The family pulled up stakes to attend Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis where students were only required to observe two of the three vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. After earning a Masters of Divinity degree, I served churches in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia listening to stories that begged to be put down in writing—with names changed to protect the guilty.
With retirement from ministry came the opportunity to take a writing class at Virginia Commonwealth University where the class mantra was “Where’s the conflict?”
So, if you think there’s too much conflict in my stories, blame the professor.
We’ve been blessed with five children—two by merger, three by acquisition—but, gratefully, are now empty-nesters. And instead of living on a Caribbean island, we travel.
So far we’ve been to all 50 of the United States, as well as to Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and most recently to Australia and New Zealand.
Have family, travel, or life experiences influenced your reading and writing? Send me a note.
