I grew up in Northern Ohio in the 1950s and 60s, living a pretty normal and globally uninteresting childhood. I liked it, though. Skipping ahead, I finally ending up with a PhD and a job as a Plant Biology professor at the University of Illinois where I spent my full career.

Now, I’m out of Illinois and living in the Idaho’s Teton Valley, surrounded on all sides by mountains. With hundreds of thousands of acres of National Forest and other public lands to hike, bike, ski, snowshoe and float in… and bears, moose, elk, deer, marmots, pine squirrels to watch… It was, and still is, a place where my imagination can run as wild as when I was a kid!

So I started writing. I started with a couple of middle-school/young adult fantasies. First Brighid appeared, then Sorche and Harper, their dog and their parents. And all the rest of the characters. Like Sorche when she first went through a portal, I never knew where the path was leading, but it was exciting to find out. And, of course, like her, I also couldn’t turn back.

Then, but totally unrelated, I started volunteering at Grand Teton National Park, and over the course of a summer, undertook a totally different kind of writing… I developed a series of pocket guides to the Wildflowers of the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve.

Are these really unrelated? Well that depends on how weird and wonderful your imagination is. I hope you like all of them.

John Cheeseman