Dan Glover

I began writing before I learned to read. I remember my mother reading fairy tales to me and my younger brother from picture books full of wolves and princes. I must have been three years old. As she read I found myself surreptitiously tracing the patterns of each of the letters that formed the words of the story with my index finger on my thigh as I realized for the first time that they represented the words my mother spoke. When she finished her story, bade us goodnight, and shut off the light, I would crawl from bed to find my crayons and coloring book to mimic the letters from the book.

We must have lived in an apartment above a store or a tavern as a flashing neon light bled through the cracked and tattered window shade my mother pulled down in an effort to lull us to sleep giving me just enough light to see by. Though I did my level best to reproduce the letters and words from those fairy tale books I could never seem to get them right. It bothered me a good deal that the objects of the world refused to bend to my efforts at reflecting them on paper.

Thus began a life-long obsession with getting the story right. I still write at night. Getting the story right continues to befuddle me. I am prone to self-doubt and often times I despair of ever writing even one true sentence. Yet I persevere. Over the years I have written millions of words all aimed at the seemingly impossible goal of creating the perfect story. I have finally decided it is not the perfection that I am shooting for so much as it is the effort it takes to bring into being that which causes me so much consternation.

My Gathering of Lovers Series takes a look into the madness and desire that arise when people find they are alone in a world not of their own making. Though the books are filled with personal loss, family abuse, mental illness, rampant alcoholism, and death, the spirit of the characters shines through even at their darkest moments as they make the best of the bad hand life has dealt them.

My Mermaid series revolves around a motley collection of human beings, the sole survivors of a world-wide plague, and the last remnants of a race of beings who once lived beneath the waters of Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia. The Mermaids Series is comprised of four books exploring the relationships that form between immortal beings attempting to survive in a decimated world slowly giving itself back to wilderness.

My newest work is the Liza McNairy series, a collection of noir and hard-boiled mystery stories revolving around a pair of private detectives often hired by the families of victims who've fallen between the cracks, who the authorities have labeled cold cases.

In the late 1990s I was honored to work with Robert M. Pirsig (author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals) which resulted in my first book called Lila's Child: An Inquiry into Quality, available in both print and as an e-file. Mr. Pirsig shares many insights into his Metaphysics of Quality, which allows for a deeper and more expanded way of understanding reality.

I also have several collections of short stories and anthologies that revolve around Zen Buddhism and Eastern teachings as seen through the eyes of Western culture.