About the Author

I grew up about 30 miles outside of Washington, D.C. in what was then undeveloped country. It was a place of cornfields and tree houses, dammed-up creeks and secret swimming holes. In the summers, my brothers and I would dash out around 8:00 am for wherever and return just in time for dinner in the evening. It was a magical place to be a kid and I wanted to recapture that wonder of discovery as fourteen year-old Kevin explores his new surroundings in my debut novel The Secret Wisdom of the Earth. When I was about Kevin's age, developers bought up most of the land and the idyllic bounds of my childhood became one big construction site - creeks were backfilled and swimming holes ran to mud. All of us neighborhood hellions felt a great sense of loss at the destruction of our woods - one we couldn't quite understand or articulate, but it hung over us that summer like a fogged-in field. By the time I went off to college, the countryside of my youth was solidly suburban. It was in college that I first fell in love with Appalachia. Initially for her music - the spinning lilt of a fiddle reel; the compact fury of a mandolin run; the plaintive harmonies - then, for her beauty, as I came to know the region in my twenties with little but a backpack and a camp stove. About that time, I met a good friend's mother for the first time - she was an incredibly beautiful woman who seemed to carry with her a deep-set sadness. I asked my friend about it and he told me the story of how his three-year-old brother died in the most horrific accident at home you could possible imagine. I carried the story of this child's death with me for many years and knew that I had to write a novel about its effect on a family. I also knew that Appalachia, a region I'd come to loved so well, would be a perfect setting for this nascent coming-of-age novel. But as the years unspooled - I graduated from college, began a career, moved to London, got married, had kids - I discovered innumerable reasons not to write. In fact, I perfected the art of excuse-making. On and on, month after month, year-to-year. And as I stared down forty, I realized that this great bright dream of being a novelist was in danger of becoming my single biggest regret. I began writing The Secret Wisdom of the Earth the very next day, with the awful death of my friend's young brother as the tragedy that sets the story in motion.It was slow-going, to be sure - I'd rise at 5:00 a.m. each morning, write in the quiet hours before work, then revise and edit in the evenings after putting my boys to bed. But it was in this routine of early rising and evening editing that the main characters, Kevin, Buzzy, Pops, Tilroy and Paul, began to take shape.I completed about half of the novel in London - fleshing out those characters, their relationships and the loss each of them suffers - but something was clearly missing from the story. The various plot paths I needed to tie everything toge

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