Authors

Phyllis Mattson

Phyllis Mattson was recognized as an “Achiever in Letters” by the National League of American Pen Women, February, 2006. An excerpt from her memoir, War Orphan in San Francisco: Letters Link a Family Scattered by World War II, appeared in HSE’s Above Ground.

Mattson was a community college teacher of Anthropology and Health Sciences in Silicon Valley. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, received graduate degrees in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin and Public Health from Harvard. She started her career in health research, culminating in a book, Holistic Health in Perspective in 1981, then turned to teaching. In 1989-90 she taught English at Shandong University in China, and in 1994 joined the Peace Corps in Nepal. She has two children and two grandchildren.

RK Marfurt

Growing up in a small, historic Swiss town where everyone knew each other’s business, R.K. Marfurt let the stories of its inhabitants, their joys, heartbreaks, quarrels, discontent and dreams fill her heart. They echo in her to this day. However removed her writing might seem from its origin — transformed through new experiences and locations, through education in different countries, through family and work life — early impressions rarely fade, and much living and writing is done in reaction to them. Her stories have appeared in American and Canadian literary journals.

Calling the Dead, the story of medium Eusapia Palladino, is R.K. Marfurt’s first novel. She has always been fascinated by psychics and fortune tellers, their motivations, self-perceptions and views of reality.  That her main character is intricately connected to the academic milieu is no accident either, as R.K. Marfurt has a longstanding interest in academic research, her husband is an academic, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada where she worked as an administrator dealt with academics and their research.

R.K. Marfurt lives with her husband in Ottawa, Canada. She has four children and six grandchildren.

Vic Cavalli

Born in Vancouver, B.C., Vic Cavalli has been teaching English at the university level since 1987, and Creative Writing at the university level since 2001. His fiction, poetry, photography, and visual art have been published in literary journals in Canada, the United States, England, and Australia. While teaching at Trinity Western University in the Fraser Valley he published his first novel, The Road to Vermilion Lake (NY: Harvard Square Editions, 2017). It’s a novel concerned with exploring the themes of generation and regeneration. His second novel, Then Pure Silence, is currently under consideration by several Canadian publishers.

Cavalli grew up in Vancouver B.C. surrounded by narratives of immigration and the Canadian wilderness, the arts and the trades. His childhood home was filled with music, art, and large house parties. Within this context, he and his father lived for the weekends and summer holidays when they would camp and fish in some of the most beautiful settings imaginable: the rivers and lakes of the Interior of British Columbia, and the Pacific ocean shoreline from Horseshoe Bay to Squamish, and off the eastern shore of Vancouver Island. After fronting some high school bands, Cavalli worked for seven years at manual labor jobs (such as operating machines and driving forklifts in factories, building steel fishing boats, and logging—setting chokers and falling trees). Eventually, an educated friend advised him to enrol in first-year College, adding, “Read some Russian novels.”

Paul Buchanan

Paul Buchanan is an award-winning professor of writing and the author of more than twenty books, including the novels Snapshots and The Last Place I Want to Be. His work has appeared in dozens of literary journals and magazines, including Story Quarterly, History Magazine, Crime Magazine, The Humanist, Morkan’s Horse, and Cicada. He holds degrees in creative writing from both USC and Chapman University.

Randal Eldon Greene

Randal Eldon Greene is the author of Descriptions of Heaven (Harvard Square Editions, 2015). His short fiction has appeared in VLP Magazine, 34thParallel, as|peers, Unbroken Journal, NRP online, and elsewhere. Greene holds a degree in English and Anthropology from the University of South Dakota. He is a volunteer judge of fiction for Heart & Mind Zine and works full time as a seeing eye human for his blind dog, Missy. Greene lives in Sioux City, Iowa. His typos are tweeted @authorgreene and his website is found at authorgreene.com