Douglas Arvidson

Blog: douglasarvidson.blogspot.com

Website: douglasarvidson.com

Twitter: @DouglasArvidson

Douglas Arvidson was, by his own admission, a sleepy, dopey, sad-looking kid. When he was six years old his parents had him tested to see if he had what now is called an "intellectual deficit." That wasn't the problem and having no other excuses for the way he was, they had to accept him for what he was--an inward-looking daydreamer, kind of drifting along in his own space. Somehow it all eventually worked out; Arvidson graduated from college with high honors, earned a Master's degree, and found his bliss teaching, traveling, and writing.

All told, he spent twenty-eight years living and working overseas, that is, outside the United States, and literally, around the world. He has lived in Iceland, Germany, and for eleven years, on a sailboat on the island of Guam. His award-winning short fiction has been published in Prague, Paris, and in literary magazines in the United States. For two and a half years he wrote monthly essays for the now-defunct Prague Revue. While living aboard his sailboat and sailing among the Marianas islands, he studied the secrets of the ancient Pacific navigators under a master navigator from Polowat atoll. His novel, Brothers of the Fire Star, which concerns ancient ocean navigation, World War II, and two boys struggle to survive, has won four literary awards, including a national Book-of-the-Year Finalist Award. It is now being used in the schools on Guam and twice Arvidson has been invited to be a Visiting Author to the Guam schools by the local chapter of the International Reading (Literacy) Association. A Drop of Wizard's Blood, Book III in his Eye of-- the Stallion fantasy series, is a stand-alone novel that won a Finalist Award in Young Adult Fiction and First Place in the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards in Science Fiction/Fantasy. He and his wife live on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.