Born and raised in southeastern Idaho, Larry has lived most of his life in one place or another on the great Snake River plain that stretches across the width of southern Idaho.
In Larry’s words.
No matter how big the world around me actually was, I grew up feeling trapped on our family farm. While I loved to explore the farm and the adjoining river, there were far too few daylight hours to do so while still getting the required farm work completed. My escape came from the most unlikely source, at least as far as a young boy was concerned. It all began the year I turned six, and entered first grade.
I took to reading like a baby duck takes to water. While I had always enjoyed being read to as a child, being able to read for myself was a wondrous miracle. No longer did I have to coax my exhausted parents to read to me. I could read to myself, for however long my eyes would hold up.
With the daytime hours filled with chores and school, I spent many of the hours I was supposed to be sleeping, exploring the world beyond our farm, beyond our country, even beyond our world and solar system. I remember hooking up a dry cell battery to an automobile light we pulled from a wrecked car in our neighbor’s junk yard. Hidden under my tented bed covers, I could read for hours, traveling wherever the story and my imagination could take me.
I remember sitting in a high school assembly and having the principle warn us that if we didn’t move beyond the confines of our small rural community, we would become so narrow that we could stand facing a keyhole and would be able to look through with both eyes at the same time. Since leaving the farm, I’ve had the good fortune to visit numerous locations and to meet people across the United States, as well as Europe and Asia.
If I’ve managed to broaden my view to the point that I can only use one eye at a time to look through a keyhole, it is thanks far more to what I have read, than what I have learned through personal travel.
This is why I write, whether technical nonfiction to unlock our understanding, or fictional stories that help us escape the constraints of our present lives. If I can fire the imagination and help empower the next generation of readers, I will have in some small way begun to pay back the gift I was given in the countless books I have read.
