Joe Cottonwood

Somehow I've never figured out a way to make a living from writing. The academic life never appealed to me, so I've been a writer/contractor for the last 30 years. As a result I haven't written as many books as I might have wished, but at least I've stayed well-grounded in the real world.

My parents were scientists, liberals in a southern state, Democrats, Unitarians, strong believers in civil rights. In a house full of books with a bomb shelter in the basement, I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland playing baseball (shortstop), rooting for Roy Sievers and Camilo Pascual and all of the Washington Senators, reading books (Travels With Charlie, U.S. 40, On the Road), and wanting only one thing: To get out of the suburbs and never go back. I wanted to see the real world. I thought "real" meant freight yards, factories, and fights. At Washington University in St. Louis, I majored in English with a heavy dose of science while working at any job that would pay my way. I escaped the draft and protested the Vietnam war. Some of my friends did not. I honor the choices they made, the duty they served, and the price they paid.

I hitchhiked all over the country searching for reality. I lived briefly on a farm in Missouri and even more briefly in Colorado where the police in Vail ushered me out of town because I looked like a hippie - and then the police in Aspen offered me a job because I looked as if I could break up bar fights (I declined). My only criminal record is a day in jail in Winnemucca, Nevada for being a passenger in a stolen truck (I didn't know it was stolen - honest!). After one bizarre year in Philadelphia, I settled for good in California where I have remained for the last 35 years.

I love the Appalachian Mountains. I love the land, people, and rivers of the Midwest. And I love where I live in La Honda, a tiny town in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I like to hike on mountains and canoe on calm water. I like to knead bread, read novels, and raise fine children. Occasionally I write songs. I used to bristle at being called a hippie but now I'm proud to be called an Old Hippie. La Honda is no longer the Acid Test/Hell's Angel hangout of the Sixties, but it is still full of cranks, dreamers, and a few astonishing outlaws. In other words, I saw the real world and decided to live elsewhere.

I wrote my first story in third grade. I planned a life of science. I liked astronomy and geology (still do). Whenever a teacher gave an assignment to write a short story, I would write 2 or 3. The stories won awards, and meanwhile I was a total goof-off in science, but I never re-examined the plan until senior year in high school when a wonderful girl hiked up Sugarloaf Mountain with me and convinced me in no uncertain terms that she believed in my writing. It was the Sixties and life was strange, but two things stayed constant and have remained so ever since: That girl, and my love of writing.