Ordinary lives, one turn from the extraordinary.

The writer

He set out to be a doctor. He ended up telling stories the old way.

James Usavage left pre-med and spent years crossing the country — car salesman, musician, carpenter, teacher — collecting the people and places that would fill his books.

A chemistry-lab accident once severed a nerve in his writing hand. The feeling came back; the habit stuck. He still writes every novel longhand, in pen, in the tradition of the authors he loves.

Wells, Conan Doyle, Dumas, London, Steinbeck, Hemingway — and now a shelf of his own, written the same patient way.

James P. Usavage