The Legendary Barons

Tommy Folgett's life is littered with disappointments: a broken marriage, alcoholism, and squandered artistic talent. But he did create one hell of a softball team. Under Tommy's tutelage, this hodge-podge of characters has lived out ten years of victories and defeats, joys and squabbles, on Friday nights at the Double River softball complex. They have, in fact, become a family.

When a broken relationship sends Tommy back to the bottle, the self-abuse spills over to his housemate and shortstop, Honus. Tommy's envy of Honus's writing career, and the campaign of subtle sabotage that follows, threatens to destroy his one great achievement: the legendary Barons.

Michael J. Vaughn was born in Brunswick, Maine, where his father, a Navy pilot, flew P-3 Orion submarine runs over the Atlantic during the October Missile Crisis. His childhood in the military subsequently brought him to Pennsylvania, Whidbey Island, Washington State (just across the Puget Sound from Bainbridge Island, the setting of "Gabriella’s Voice"); Hawaii, and San Jose, California, where he has lived since 1973.

Vaughn is a graduate of the now-defunct Peterson High School in Sunnyvale (one of his classmates was ice skater Brian Boitano), and earned a B.A. in Journalism with a minor in choral music from San Jose State University in 1984, singing tenor with the San Jose State Concert Choir. He has worked as a theater and opera critic since his graduation, mostly for Metro Publications in San Jose and the Palo Alto Weekly. From 1989-1992, he was publicity director for Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts in Saratoga.

Vaughn is the author of the choral novel "Frozen Music" (Northwest Publishing, Salt Lake City, 1995) and the illustrated storybook "An Agnostic Christmas" (Dragonfly Press, Chicago, 1999). For "Gabriella’s Voice," he received a 1998 Novelist Fellowship from Arts Council Silicon Valley. His poems have been published in more than two dozen literary journals, winning an Editor’s Choice Award from Plainsongs literary journal (Nebraska) and an Honorable Mention in the Emily Dickinson Poetry Competition (Arizona).

Vaughn lives in San Jose, California, where he works as an opera and theater critic, serves as Fiction Editor for The Montserrat Review literary journal, plays drums with the blues band Randie and the eDawgs, and plays shortstop and left field on various softball teams. Much of the background for "Gabriella’s Voice" was inspired by soprano Jennifer Der Torossian and the Bay Shore Lyric Opera Company in Capitola, California.