Tell us a little about yourself and The Moon and The Gryphon.

I grew up in horse country, so of course my first jobs were mucking out stalls and baling hay. I lived in Ireland for a time, and during fall hunting season I rode with the field in foxhunts. (In the novel, there is a madcap foxhunt, embellished!). Later, I worked in advertising before transitioning to journalism as a police reporter and as a feature writer for various daily newspapers. Later, I owned and operated a bookstore before selling it and traveling extensively throughout Europe, including visits to Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, and Montenegro, all of which serve as backdrops for this novel.

How did you develop the style and structure of The Moon and The Gryphon?

The novel has gone through several iterations. I wrote the first version of The Moon and The Gryphon after being inspired by the mystery and the poetry found in the 1977 publication of The Nag Hammadi Library in English, and that inspiration carries through. In coming up with a method, if not a genre, I decided the story should have an almost Gothic/Romantic feel—this by merging the commonplace with the mysterious to put the reader in touch with the surreal underpinnings rolling around our vast universe. The Russian author Gogol did so through a method called fantastical realism, combining the empirical with the magical. My approach employs what I call a skewing of the ordinary, which I scatter through my novel. Why? Because I think sometimes it is valuable to short-circuit the rational mind by contemplating the Infinite and the Miraculous to make leaps of understanding. After I started writing this novel, I realized, for me, The Moon and The Gryphon is a spiritual journey, but wrapped in the satisfying aspects of an action/thriller.

What kind of research did you do for this book?

While researching my novel, I used many texts for reference, including finds from our bookstore. Also, much of this research occurred back in the stacks of libraries—before the advent of general internet access—for resources like The ERANOS Yearbooks, Robert Graves’ works, Rosicrucian tracts, and books about ancient caves, like Jacques Gaffarel’s Le Monde Sousterrein (1606–81). In addition to The Nag Hammadi Library volumes, I researched mythology, Gnosticism, history, folk tales, Jungian psychology, and English Romantic poets. My wife and I also visited many historic, mystical sites throughout the British Isles, Ireland, and Europe, finding obscure standing stones in farmers’ fields, lost chapels in the mountains, enormous caves… we were even able to climb up to the balconies of Notre Dame in Paris before it was closed to tourists.

What are you working on now?

My next book is a volume of short stories and poems, which I am in the process of editing now. The stories vary widely, but here is a taste of one:

"Getting to Know the Neighbors" – When you move into a new, unfamiliar neighborhood, it behooves you to sense out the tricky substrata that always exists beneath the more visible social relations and cultural dealings that teem in your new surroundings. If you do not, well, things can twist unhappily for you.

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.