Biography - Douglas Arvidson, Author

I grew up on a small farm in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. After graduating from high school - one of a senior class of just seventeen students - I attended Emerson College in Boston for a couple of years. I then found myself in the Army, serving in the Signal Corps in the Republic of China during the Viet Nam War. When I came home, I finished my B.A. and M.A. in Communications Disorders at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

In 1981, my wife, Terry, and I moved to Key West where I worked as a broadcast journalist for two years before joining the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) and moving overseas to teach. We spent two years in Iceland and then twelve in Germany, teaching and traveling and raising two children while I worked seriously at learning to write.

In 1992, my first published short story appeared in a small literary magazine in Minnesota and shortly after that it was published again in the Prague Review. In 1994, my story, "The Rifle", won an international short story competition in Paris and was published in the literary journal, Paris Transcontinental.

Three years later we accepted a transfer to the island of Guam in the western Pacific where we bought the sailboat and moved aboard. We lived on that boat for almost ten years and it was there that I wrote the Eye of the Stallion Fantasy Series. It was also while living on Guam and while sailing among the tropical islands of Micronesia, that I studied the ancient secrets of the Pacific island navigators, the basis for my adventure novel Brothers of the Fire Star. Terry and I now live on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. We still sail and still travel, but it's wonderful, after twenty-eight years living overseas, to be home.

We survived that wild, moonlit night at sea when everything was falling apart, and now, looking back on it, it seems to have been a very fine adventure. I have always thought that that was the way life should seem, at least when you look back over it - a very fine adventure, and maybe something to write about.