About Levi
THE SHORT VERSION (25 words): Levi Jacobs is the award-winning author of the Tidecaller Chronicles and The Empire of Resonance. When not writing, he sells fruit in his native North Dakota.
THE SLIGHTLY LONGER VERSION (50 words): Levi Jacobs was born in North Dakota and grew up in Japan and Uganda, so he was bound to have a speculative take on modern life. Currently marketing his award-winning Tidecaller Chronices, and at work on three more series, he runs a small fruit company to pay the bills.
THE LONG VERSION (100 words): Levi Jacobs is the author of the Tidecaller Chronicles and Empire of Resonance epic fantasy series, with three more series in pre-publication. He has received the Colorado Gold award in Speculative Fiction, taken first place in The Zebulon Fiction Contest for Science Fiction, and been a finalist in Mark Lawrence's SPFBO. Hailing from North Dakota, with much of his formative years spent in Japan and Uganda, Levi has an MA in Cultural Anthropology and sells fruit in the oil fields to make a living. Learn more at www.levijacobs.com.
THE FULL MONTY:
I grew up in the sticks.
There's no other way to put it, really, and it means a lot to who I turned out to be (a fruit-selling science fiction author). People tend to look at me funny when I say I'm from North Dakota--like they're realizing though they've visited all 50 states, they somehow missed that one. Or maybe just passed through the corner and kinda remember a windy flat place. People don't come too often, and we tend to leave even less.
I'm one who did leave. Not by choice, at first, as my family followed my Dad's career through seven different small towns, but I guess the moving got into my blood. After earning a double major in Philosophy and Literature between California and Nebraska, I packed up and moved to Japan for four years, spending half that time either traveling southeast Asia, or working aboard a Japanese NGO-chartered cruise ship.
I got an itch somewhere in that time to experience a life that was not only culturally but economically different than the one I'd been living, and moved to Uganda with a few thousand dollars in the bank and the vague idea that I wanted to do something meaningful. And write--this was the first time in my life I made writing a serious goal. I drafted my first two books while I was there (travelogues), though I doubt I'll ever finish them.
At some point in there, nearly thirty years old and really no professional skills worth pursuing, I started applying to graduate programs in anthropology, which I'd never studied but vaguely understood to mean the study of culture, and figured meant a way to professionalize my love of travel and people.
I got lucky, in more ways than one. One was that a program--the University of Colorado Boulder--accepted me with some financial assistance. The second was that Boulder happened to be next door to my sister, and after six years living abroad I was ready to be closer to family. The third thing was that anthropology--cultural anthropology, the study of living peoples (my colleagues will dislike this pedantic description)--turned out to be fascinating, and a goldmine for a brain that spent its spare time imagining new peoples, worlds, lifeways, magic systems, etc.
That was the bad part, too. One month into the two-year program, a question started nagging me--what if I was working this hard (70-80 hours a week) at something I really wanted to do? Something that's been bugging me since I was, oh, eight years old?
What if I was working this hard writing fiction?
Around the time this question got too loud to ignore, the studies also got a little easier, and like MacBeth I decided I'd waded so far in blood, I might as well push on to the farther shore. But as soon as I got the degree, I dropped it all and picked up a pen.
Well, a hoe, really. While my cohort was doing preliminary fieldwork and setting up their PhD research, I moved back to North Dakota to help my Dad farm vegetables. At the end of ND's short growing season, I'd made not even as much as my grad student stipend had been, but I returned to Colorado determined to live on it, so I could focus on writing.
I ended up living in a laundry room (we took the washer and dryer out) in a house shared with seven other people. That fall, winter and spring I wrote twelve short stories and my first novel (which I will also likely never publish). I didn't make a dime and started the next summer broke but in love with writing.
Thus entered my current fruit-selling career: a way to make money that left some of the year to write. Thirteen years later I am still bringing fresh peaches and cherries to the good people of North Dakota, and though there's a wife and kids in the picture these days, still spending much of my off-season writing novels.
And that's what I'll keep doing, until we sell enough books I can quit the summer gig. Thanks for any books you've read and support you've given--it means the world to me.
Levi
Appearances
Interview on Space-Autistic Author Channel: part author talk, part fictionalized space epic, all intriguing, with fellow Colorado author X. Ho Yen.