Stuart R Ward

Stuart R Ward was born and raised in San Francisco in the fifties and sixties. After seven years dharma-bumming around the West, hitchhiking and riding the rails, in 1978, wanderlust spent, he settled on two acres of high-desert woodlands near Mt. Shasta, CA. He has lived there ever since, building a tiny big-tiny off-grid home in a charming, if trey peculiar, failed subdivision. He's gotten all his electricity from the sun since 1989.

He worked 17 years as a volunteer at nearby Stewart Mineral Springs,building and maintaining the bathhouse creek cold plunge, and recently retired from a successful cottage industry wholesaling local pumice stones online nationwide. Suddenly having time on his hands beyond doing jigsaws, enjoying saunas, clearing brush and tinkering on the piano, he returned his longtime love, writing, and self-published his first book in 19 years. Former efforts include "Body Freedom Day" and "Strange Days Indeed."

His dysfunctional backwoods subdivision of 47 years residency is the fodder-rich subject of "Welcome, Now Leave." The book represents his first foray into purely nonfictional writing.