C. D. Faulconer, a biography
Birth: Walla Walla, Washington. Sweet onions. Fields of wheat ripening in swirling Rembrandt gold. Distant mountain flanks tractored into quilts. Leaping fires in those mountains from dry lightning.
Birth: Santa Cruz, California. Abandonment. A rented hotel room above the Boardwalk. Neon lights bouncing off the bedroom walls. Fear.
Birth: Concord, California. A son born early and jaundiced. A clumsy mother.
Birth: Kansas. A resolve to do asunder the marriage that had failed.
Birth: San Francisco. A college degree. A teaching credential.
Birth: Santa Rosa, California. Pain. Dark lessons.
Birth: Oregon. Mildew and generosity. Illness.
Birth: San Anselmo and Sausalito, California. A journey around the world. The Taj Mahal.
Birth: San Francisco. Marriage. Conversion to loving and being loved.
My heritage is Danish . . . Frandsen was my maiden name.
I write under my maternal great-grandfather's surname, (Jesse) Faulconer. In old Oregon he was a dentist and witnessed scalpings by the Indians. Later, he heard his Call to preach Christ. His congregation was large. He converted many Indians.
I was married to Tom Jilek for 22 years. He died in July of 2006. We were rarely apart and shared a deeply-loving, unabashed union. Tom never doubted my ability to write, and relentlessly picked me up off the defeated floor insisting that I keep going when I said I couldn't because the hundreds and perhaps thousands of rejections had bloodied me. My apprenticeship is truly a study in sheer perseverence and fortitude.
I am a Christian and capitulate my trust to pursue what God has given me to do with my life. Nothing else matters quite so much as that. The Call to write, my Road to Damascus, came in 1984.
My Baccalaureate Degree was earned at San Francisco State University. A Teaching Credential was also earned from that institution. Teachers were spilling into the streets back then in the early 1970's, and unable to find a full-time teaching position, I turned my back on the classroom world . . . forever. Another diploma was earned after four additional years of study from The Institute of Writing for Children and Teenagers.
Six books, short stories, and copious letters have so far struggled through my pen.
For whereabouts, I live in the Chaparral zone of Glen Ellen in the mountains above the Sonoma Valley in California. It is a two-acre, tranquil grain of earth in the starry night and time. I am blessed to call this Home, with my three Chihuahuas: Tiger Lily; Pocket; and Jimmy.
White wing, black wing . . . writing is an echo . . .it flies to my soul . . .it is fastened there.
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