About the Author

Mark Mozden lands on this planet two weeks before John Glenn becomes the first man to escape it, albeit temporarily and only as far as near earth orbit, in 1962. That act of planetary home of record audacious transcendence is indelibly imprinted on MM’s young neurons, indeed his sharpest early childhood memories are of rapt attention to what his mom calls the “idiot box,” watching NASA moon shots and Star Trek episodes from the living room floor of their brick house, in western Massachusetts. Catholic grade school does little to dissuade MM from his conviction that he will not only fly to space some day, but do so in a space ship he will build himself. He is frequently in very big trouble for secretly reading library books in class. Scholarly, remote, ascetic Wilbraham Monson Academy introduces MM to existentialism, girls, and guitars. Spaceship designs go up in smoke. MM turns to playwriting, poetry, and physics, and becomes a high school newspaper editor. The high frontier is lost to interlocutions with innerspace, and bacchanalia ritualaria. At Syracuse University, MM’s compass locks firmly but sadly in diametrical opposition: Aerospace and Writing. Going north and south simultaneously at full speed ahead, it appears unlikely MM will get anywhere, ever. Still all thrust and no vector, MM finds work as a research engineer in the wind tunnel facility of an international technology conglomerate. Here, the mystery of space flight is finally revealed to him by a scientist working on a military space program: “Pour half the money they give you into the pointy end of the rocket. Burn it out the back end. Keep the other half of the money. Repeat.” With his compass still locked in opposite directions, MM decides to become a novelist by quitting his somewhat lucrative career in aerodynamics to become an Air Force pilot, and thereby Hemingwayesquely see the world, meet lots of characters, fly jets, and write novels, all at the same time. But the reality of flying in war after war is that it is rather time consuming. Stymied, he writes short stories, and publishes “Tina,” a story about the search for love and consumer goods in a globalized world. After bombing the world with food and blowing up the occasional odd dictator of our allies for a decade, MM quits the military to settle down and write. Instead of doing so in a collegiate setting under the auspices of an MFA, he wanders Ireland for a spell, and then monkishly locks himself in a tiny flat in the Northwest to do nothing but write, which not being a synonym nor even a rhyme nor an alliteration of drink still results in him—all in the space of two years!—marrying a girl, adopting her children, having a baby, rupturing a lumbar disk, going blind in one eye (curable, fortunately), suffering his wife’s rabid decamp, falling into deep poverty, and moving with three children onto a boat that he gets for free, because it’s being towed for salvage, because it’s rotten, and like himself, is slowly sinking. His old squadron commander, wondering what new worlds MM is conquering post-military career, asks a fellow pilot, “how’s goldenboy Mozden doing these days?” and is told, “He’s broke, crippled, blind in one eye, and living on a boat with three kids…” So far now from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise that even Scotty can’t beam him up, MM becomes a student of yoga and heals himself. He teaches his children how to swim before they can drown, learns how to restore a wooden yacht faster than it can sink, meets many true friends, falls in love with the sea, and realizes he really is going to need a dayjob for a while yet. Bouncing back from the Davy Jones Locker of divorce, disease, and destitution; MM writes a number of screenplays and novels. MM currently lives with his youngest child in a treehouse in Portland, Oregon.