Francis Voignier

Francis Voignier is an author, musician, guitar builder, and graphic artist who resides in the Northern California city of Eureka. He was born and raised in Eastern France but moved to London in his early twenties after serving his time in the French military in Germany. He relocated to New York City in the late seventies, worked in graphics, music production, and wrote reviews for musical equipment publications. In 1982, he started his long love affair with San Francisco where he developed an affinity for the hidden beauty and character of back alleys, alternative lifestyles, and the colorful mindset of its denizens. Like many free-thinkers of the time, Mr. Voignier survived on odd jobs, including the position of translator and technical adviser for French president Francois Mitterrand's communication team. But other horizons were also calling and the lure of large incomes in the company of world figures couldn't silence their powers. He left the suits and the ties behind to resume with his work in music and literature. He wrote hundreds of songs and dozens of short stories, before forging ahead into the world of fiction.

The four volume series of "An Improbable Emergence" that includes "The Disappearance of Olaf Swyndle," "The Heltor Dilemma," "Ma-l's Grand Gathering," and "Convergence of the Realms," is, to a vast extent, the cumulative effect of the diversity of experience as seen by the untethered mind. In it, the exploration of probable realities, as well as improbable ones such as the interverse, or discarded layers of realities, take the thinking process into impossible places where angels, lords, detectives, and quantum computers aim at uncovering the pocket worlds of ancient, dreaming warriors.

"Escape from Inconsequence" is a story of corruption that takes two runaways, Julia and Stefan, through a string of troubles with the mafia, the French police, US drug-fighting agencies, and various characters who at times become indistinguishable from the truants and heroes they stand up against.

"Reyes & Leeds" is a love story between a San Francisco Latina cab driver and a British neuroscientist on a one week visit to attend a medical convention in the Golden Gate city. It is a tale of unlikely attraction between two individuals who couldn't be more different from each other, yet their commitment to authenticity forges a link that brings them to faces the distinct impact of their choices and what comes of them.

"Story of a Tale-Maker" is Janette Trudy Smythe's narration of her challenging life in the Program, a special academy through which she teaches the lost sciences of tale-making and bridge-building, and of her fight against the forces that aim at undoing her work.