Aaron Peterson

Aaron Peterson writes the way he lives: with dirt on his hands, miles on his boots and curiosity still doing most of the steering.

After retirement, he returned seriously to something he had been doing since childhood. He had written for years, won amateur writing contests and then, like a lot of people, packed that ambition away while adulthood got busy. Eventually he took it back out.

His nonfiction grows from lived experience and an unreasonable desire to understand how things actually work. Gardening, herbalism, food, travel, buying cars or whatever rabbit hole happens to be open, Aaron tends to keep digging long after a sensible person would have stopped.

His fiction comes from the same place.

Books such as The Backyard Apothecary and Experience Calabria Slowly are practical and grounded in use rather than theory. The Twisted Kilt: The Weight Taken takes that curiosity somewhere darker, into contemporary fantasy shaped by folklore, consequence and the uncomfortable choices people make when there is no clean answer.

Across genres, Aaron writes books he would want to read himself: useful when they need to be useful, atmospheric when they need to be strange and never particularly interested in pretending life is simpler than it is.

There may still be rosemary in the air and dust on the back roads.

Sometimes, though, something is following you.