Robert Walton
Bewildering Stories biography
|
I’m a retired middle-school teacher with thirty-six years of service. I am also a life-long rock-climber and mountaineer. I’ve made many ascents, especially in Yosemite and Pinnacles National Park.
Allow me to observe that teaching middle school is far more dangerous and challenging than rock climbing. I still get out on the rock, though my younger partners (and that’s ALL of them) circumspectly guide me to leads on which I’ll probably not break anything important should I fall.
My sport often informs my writing. Three of my short stories about climbing were published in the Sierra Club’s Ascent. I converted a story named "Three’s a Crowd" into a radio play and it was broadcast on KUSF on November 22nd, 2006 and subsequently on other NPR affiliates.
My novel, Dawn Drums, was awarded both the New Mexico Book Awards 2014 Tony Hillerman Award for Best Fiction and the Arizona Authors Association 2014 First Place Award for published fiction. It’s a Civil War tale and was inspired by my middle-school students. I was dissatisfied with all the things that weren’t in our history books — about slavery, women and ordinary soldiers — so I spent decades finding source material to fill these major gaps in our story. The novel was born of these researches and I’m very proud of it. Quite to my surprise, Abe Lincoln became a main character.
My short stories have won a number of awards. "Dogwood Dream" won first place in New Millennium Writing’s 2011 short fiction contest. My novella "Vienna Station" won the 2011 Galaxy prize and was published as an e-book. It is available for Kindle on Amazon. Most recently, My short story “Duck Plucking Time” won first place in a Saturday Writers short fiction contest.
I’ve still got far more stories to tell than time to tell them. May it ever be so! Here’s the link to my website if I haven’t said enough.
Copyright © 2020 by Robert Walton
