Gary Tillery

I've been a writer all my life, working in both nonfiction and fiction.

My fascination with John Lennon led me to write The Cynical Idealist: A Spiritual Biography of John Lennon. Published by Quest Books in 2009, it was translated into German, French, Portuguese, and Danish. I followed up its success with Working Class Mystic: A Spiritual Biography of George Harrison, The Seeker King, focused on Elvis Presley, and Uncommon Faith, which examined the spiritual life of Barack Obama.

Fiction-wise, I've chronicled the adventures of "soft-boiled" detective Jack Savage in three comic novels -- Death, Be Not Loud, To an Aesthete Dying Young, and She Stalks in Beauty. (Poor Jack, perpetually a square peg in a world of round holes.)

I have also published three literary novels:

I have long been fascinated by Jesus--not as a religious icon, but as a figure of history. Yeshua, My Beloved integrates over thirty years of my study of hundreds of works by scholars. I subtitle it "A Fact-Based Gospel According to Mary Magdalene." Almost nothing is known about Mary, so her story is fiction, but her narrative of the ministry of Jesus is as factual and historically accurate as modern scholarship can make it. The book holds a number of surprises for people who have never looked past the common perception of Jesus. (Did you know that he had four brothers?--and that three were likely among his twelve apostles? Did you know that ancient sources allege that his real father was a Roman soldier named Pantera?)

I served in Vietnam in 1968-69. Darkling Plain is composed of interlinked short stories--some based on my own experiences, some coming from my imagination, and some of which I heard while I served there.

The Roots of the Wind, set in Congo, interweaves the stories of a man haunted by personal tragedy, a woman with eerily accurate insights into fossils being excavated, and a poignant mystery from a quarter-of-a-million years ago. The background is drawn from an expedition in which I took part.

I have also published poetry, most notably On the Road to Tangier. All but a few of the poems in the collection first appeared in Telicom, the prestigious journal of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. Previously, I published Through a Dark, Glassly, as well as a collection of haiku titled 50 Epiphanies. In 2014, to commemorate a century of baseball at Wrigley Field, I published The Ghosts of Wrigley Field, a narrative poem recounting memorable events that took place there.