Bob Mustin

Hello! There's a good chance that I'm a lot like you - - I'm a compulsive reader, and always have been. And as far back as age eight, I've made stabs at writing. My first story was one I recited to my mom (I hadn't learned to write very well yet, and her handwriting was letter perfect), "Peter and the Golden Cave," a blatant ripoff of an old Ali Baba story. I had a lot of encouragement to write while in high school, but fate took me into the military (the U.S. Naval Academy) and later into engineering school (Louisiana Tech) and a career in transportation.

Still, writing cropped up - I wrote letters for my bosses, even became a specification writer, and editor of our agency's newsletter. And I managed a small literary journal, the Rural Sophisticate, then based in Georgia.

It wasn't long before the fiction-writing bug hit me - hard. I took it seriously and began writing short stories, took writing seminars and classes, and finally began a novel. Then a great break: I won a place as North Carolina Writer in Residence at Peace College, under Doris Betts' guiding hand. After moving to North Carolina, I entered UNC-Asheville's MLA program and, after focusing on creative writing, I secured that most treasured degree.

Now my wife and I live in a semi-rural locale near Asheville, where we share our property with three koi, a band of contentious squirrels, and a wary copperhead snake.

As they have a way of saying on the British sitcoms, "That's it, really." Still, I've included some of my publishing credits below, ones not in evidence on Amazon, just in case you're interested.

My work has appeared in The Rockhurst Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Cooweescoowee, Under The Sun, Gihon River Review, Reflections Literary Journal, and at thesquaretable.com, raving dove, Sport Literate, The Externalist, Language and Culture, and R.KV.R.Y in electronic form. A creative nonfiction piece won the North Carolina Writer's Network Rose Post Award for Creative Non-Fiction in 2007.