Heya. Mark Bourne here.

Recent transplant to Seattle, which I just love.

I'm a writer and creative director by trade, an astronomy buff by both avocation and erstwhile vocation, have been a seriously good teacher, and paid the rent as an actor and stage director. There have been times when I've been able to combine all of the above. This site serves largely as an extension of my business card and an addendum to my résumé. As such it has served me well and profitably.

So feel welcome to catch up on news, read a story, or explore the night sky. I enjoy hearing from total strangers who've found their way here, so don't be shy about dropping me a note. Enjoy yourself.

Goals to enjoy before I die: trekking all up and down and across and around Great Britain. Seeing the night sky from the Southern Hemisphere. Having my novels on the shelves between Beaudelaire and Bradbury. Perfecting a great pizza recipe.

Professionally and academically I've been lucky enough to get paid for my passions. I love theater (they paid me to get an M.A. in it) and astronomy (I've been known to teach it and write about it as well as spend long, cold nights outdoors looking up through expensive tubing). I enjoy seeing my work go public in a big way with museums, video productions, film journalism, and, well, just about anything else that wings my way. Now and then I sell fiction to pro markets, and am getting into that First Novel thing.

Played jazz sax throughout college, though not well enough to be doing so now. Musical tastes are diverse, with special predilections toward big symphony orchestras, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Tom Waits, B.B. King, Jonathan Coulton, the Red Elvises, the blues, big & brassy jazz bands, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Django Reinhardt, '60s-vintage rock (hardcore Beatles fan here), medieval to Renaissance madrigals and liturgical music, Sinatra, Celtic (traditional and the newer stuff if it's not too New Agey), Stephen Sondheim, Paul Simon, John Lennon, the Roches, Frank Zappa, Cole Porter, Louis Armstrong.... Elizabeth is on a mission to expose me to the new stuff.

I have also...

...taught English lit, writing, and drama to high school students, and astronomy to little kids and adults; directed a senior class play and a semi-professional theater company; been a TV science correspondent; raised the hackles of Rush Limbaugh, who spent a big chunk of his air-time on an op-ed I wrote (truly the pen is mightier than the OxyContin); worked in cooperation with Ray Bradbury to bring two of his plays to life; written and seen produced scripts under the aegis of Paramount Pictures and lived to tell about it; performed with sketch and improvisational comedy groups before large and rowdy audiences; served my country as the Special Guest Buckaroo on the Ranger Bob children's TV show; and assistant-directed an outdoor Shakespeare Festival. Am both a "dog person" and a "cat person." Will probably never tire of watching Casablanca. And there's an alien star system named for me in the Star Wars universe.

Turn ons: New York City, London, damn good coffee, Tom Stoppard, Harper's, Billy Wilder, Eudora Welty, Studs Terkel, Improv Everywhere, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Tati, the New Vaudeville, the old Vaudeville, the Boing Boing, Bogie, Hayao Miyazaki's films, Chuck Jones & Tex Avery & Bob Clampett, Bowmore Darkest Islay, Doonesbury, Narrative magazine, Ringo Starr, best-years Woody Allen, the Coen Brothers, This American Life, Fresh Air, Miles Davis, Penn & Teller, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, Philip Glass, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, Stephen Sondheim, René Magritte, the original King Kong, Stephen Jay Gould, Timothy Ferris, T.S. Eliot, Ray Harryhausen, Robertson Davies, Carl Sagan, John Steinbeck, the Alice books, William Faulkner, and Guinness Stout.

Writers and other interesting people worth getting to know include Michael Chabon, T.C. Boyle, Neal Pollack, Graham Joyce, Christopher Durang, M. John Harrison, David Delamare and Wendy Ice, John Varley, Nick DiChario, Mary Rosenblum, Louise Marley, Cherie Priest, Jay Lake, David Marusek, James Patrick Kelly, Steven Barnes, K.W. Jeter, Bill Shunn, Harlan Ellison, Kelly Link, Deanna Hoak, Will Shetterly & Emma Bull, Matt Ruff, Terry Bisson, Greg Bear, Paul Di Filippo, Kim Newman, Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, M.E. Russell....

Eddie Valiant: "What do you see in that guy?"
Jessica Rabbit: "He makes me laugh." — Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Funny: the Marx Brothers, Blackadder, xkcd, The Daily Show, Stephen Fry, Tom Tomorrow, the old National Lampoon Radio Hour, Tom the Dancing Bug, Blazing Saddles, Roy Blount Jr., The Simpsons, Tom Lehrer, Monty Python, Firesign Theatre, Pogo, Calvin & Hobbes, The Onion.



Reached the Pacific Northwest by way of the shores of Lake Ontario by way of the midwest by way of the Ozarks south, so how I ended up without a discernable accent of some sort is something of a mystery. Was in New York City long enough to be assigned to teach English at Bushwick High School in Brooklyn. I still have the certificate, but you notice that I'm on the other side of the continent now.

Not long ago, stately Bourne manor relocated from Portland to Seattle, specifically West Seattle, just a short walk to the local hub of activity, the Junction, and a boot-scoot to Alki Beach. We're at a crest of the peninsula, so with water on three sides of us, plus the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges jagging the eastern and western horizons, the views can be quite nice. Hello, Seattle.

Flickr set:





Of course, out of the many people I have met in my life and travels — acquaintances whose lives intersected with mine briefly but meaningfully, friends and others coupling with mine for longer (some still ongoing) periods — not a one has had a greater beneficial impact on my heart and head than my wife, Elizabeth Lawhead Bourne. She's one of the best. She's taught me a lot — how to weed a garden, how to cook with the expensive kitchenware, that rosemary from the yard is better than the store-bought kind, what to do when it's cold and snowy out but you want to hit the outdoor hot tubs anyway (you hit the hot tubs and watch the snow melt against an invisible dome over your head).

Having been an artsy edge-chick in Boston, Manhattan, and Toronto, Elizabeth has become a veritable Wise Woman of the Tribe among our friends, who recognize that she is dangerously intelligent, experienced, perceptive, and an astute judge of character. She has repeatedly demonstrated that she is a woman who embodies the Oz-ish virtues of brains, heart, and courage, and I try to learn from her example. As my Southern Gentleman father would say, she's a good'n.

We met when we worked together on the Star Trek: Orion Rendezvous planetarium show. (I was the writer and creative director, she was the hired-gun computer graphics artist.) Remarkably well-read and diverse, she has too many enthusiasms to ever be boring or bored. At the moment she's addicted of the novels of Patrick O'Brian, Robertson Davies, and, natch, Jane Austen. In the nonfiction realm, she's currently riding a fascination for Hellenistic Alexandria, its famous Library and medical practices. (Elizabeth is a long-time subscriber to Archaeology magazine, and in a nearby alternate reality she's Indiana Jones's chief competition.)

A computer graphics artist since before it was cool, she illustrated the Arkham House Press collection of stories by Mary Rosenblum, Synthesis and Other Virtual Realities. Look for it and play "Name That Author" with the illos (imagine Kristine Kathryn Rusch as a centaur). She co-owned her own computer graphics business for 12 years, then was enticed away to become an exec (ultimately CEO) at a dotcom. She graduated from that to a cushy exec position in a firm that blissfully has nothing to do with either dots or coms, thus removing her from daily Dilbert scenarios while providing her with an office overlooking the Seattle cityscape. We're not complaining a bit.