Patrick Moran

Patrick Moran has been writing stories for forty years. He has written fourteen novels and a dozen or so short pieces, some, or all, of which defy easy description. Suffice to say, the novels and stories all resemble to one degree or another in prose that quaint historical curiosity known as the Mohole Project, which was an attempt in the mid-20th Century by misguided and misdirected under-employed engineer types to bore a hole through the outer crust of the Earth, to the mantle and, thence, to the outer reaches of its core, in the hope that by descending to the center of the physical world they would learn where it (and therefore we) came from, and where it (and we) were going.

In other words, schooled in Geography at UCLA, he has tried to use his word processor much like a drill bit, boring with it through the outer layers of that crenulated over-flap of under-utilized gray matter we loosely term self-awareness, into the core of the neuronal root-ball beneath it that we call consciousness, in the hope that the mysterious core at the center of all things would reveal itself. Whether he's succeeded or not is not for him to say. He only knows that in these many years there are just two indisputable things he's learned: that pointing is still the best tool that anybody can ever use to explain any one thing and all things; and that love is the center of gravity to which our compass needles point.

When he is not writing, he is throwing sticks for his Labrador Retrievers, and using hammers to pound nails into the various out-of-plumb structures he builds with his wife and life-partner on their five acres of wildly overpriced oak forest, and then using crowbars to unbend the same nails. Likewise, he has made a living working with people whose luck in life can be measured by the degree to which their minds and bodies, bent by the nails of genetic inequity or just plain shitty luck, can be straightened by the crowbar of social equity. All in all, in other words, his is a good life he wouldn't trade for anything, except, perhaps, for a better understanding of this one.