Jerry Soffer

I'd see nameless childhood fears lurking silently in the daylight; enigmas whose long, long unravelling only led to new uncertainties. That's why I write like I do, and why I didn't start until late in life. After thirty five years as a criminal lawyer in Newark, New Jersey (where Fellini meets Hieronymus Bosch) I had names for some of those fears, and was seeing myself as a storyteller, from the way juries reacted to me and the way I wrote appellate briefs. I was fortunate enough to be able to retire, so at age 62, I left the criminal courts and wrote full time. The protagonist of the short story I'd begun several years previous had gotten away from me by then, and the story became my novel, "the shadow of Xeno's eye."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti said "Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." That applies to segments of all the arts (I doubt he meant to include Hallmark Card poetry). It certainly applies to fiction, especially fiction that explores the shadows that lie deep in our collective unconscious. Myths and fairy tales make great platforms for fiction. They've endured because they're rooted in our collective unconscious, and reveal so much when we peel back the surface to explore the shadows underneath.

I live in northern NewJersey, where my wife and I raised our twin daughters, who are now grown and on their own. My three special ladies, the lights of my life, kept me stable and superficially sane while I worked through my own shadows to the penumbra, from where I could safely look back into the darkness and write, or out into the light and smile.