James Kraus

James Kraus began his writing career when a High School English Teacher asked him to write an article or a short story for the School Magazine. While James was not overly enthused with an additional work assignment at the time, his teacher was nevertheless persistent and determined that this would happen. And so it did, and James wrote three chapters of “Blazing Guns along the Chisholm Trail.” To his great surprise, students were actually reading it.

A love for trout fishing and the outdoors inspire James to study Forestry, specifically Forest Recreation, and he graduated from Colorado State University with a Masters in this field. He began teaching forest recreation in 1969 at Paul Smith’s College in the northern Adirondacks of New York State. During his thirty year teaching career he renewed his interest in writing and wrote and produced numerous articles, short stories, filmstrips, videos, and formal slide shows on a variety of outdoor subjects.

In 2009, James published a paper photo book entitled, ADIRONDACK MOMENTS with Firefly Books and in 2013 he published his first novel, THE FORESTER with CreateSpace. In 2015, he published eight photo ebooks, which are listed here on his Author Page.

James has always been concerned about the ecological health of forests and nature in general, which motivate him to study forestry and to write his novel. While most novels and movies dealing with the profession of forestry have been about forest fires and logging, James decided to write a serious story about a forester unknowingly searching for his place in nature and a way of balancing the often conflicting economic and non-economic forest values that many foresters deal with all the time. THE FORESTER is also an adventure and love story, but at its highest level it is a story about the human relationship with nature.

James presently lives in Oregon with his wife Annie, and spends as much time as he can with his grand kids. He also is pointing his camera at the northwest landscape and testing some of the waters with his fly rod. There are also a few more writing projects on his agenda.

Special thanks to Jim Bullard, a photo buddy, for his nice ID photo, which is posted here.