photo by Daniel Leighton

********************************************************* I was born in 1945 -- Gary Osgood Clark etched upon my birth certificate -- in the small rural town of Norfolk, MA. There and in the adjoining town of Millis I spent the next twelve or so years learning about nature, cheering on the Red Sox, and experiencing science fiction for the first time via Jules Verne, Tom Swift, and Godzilla. In 1959, both my sisters grown and on their own, my parents suddenly decided to move to California. Packing most of our belongings into a '57 Ford Fairlane, my dear aunt coming along for the ride, we all squeezed inside and trekked across country picking up Rt. 66 near Chicago and eventually ending up in San Jose, CA. I've lived in California ever since, for 25 years in the San Francisco bay area, and finally here in Davis, where my son grew up, and where I worked for the last twenty five years as a library assistant at the University Of California, before retiring. It was during my college years that I first tried my hand at writing, taking fiction writing classes at San Jose State Univ., and then on my own, attempting poetry. It was a survey course in contemporary American poetry taught by Rob Swigart,(who later went on to write a number of novels) that helped spur my interest. Many rejection slips later, a short nature poem of mine was published in the Big Sur Gazette in 1979. More rejection slips followed, but so did acceptances. Eventually two chapbooks of my poems saw print, Letting the Eye to Wonder and 7 Degrees of Something, in 1990 and 1991 respectively. These were pretty much mainstream poems, though as one reviewer recently discovered, a few seeds of speculative poetry can be found among them. My first speculative poem was actually published in 1988, in the Magazine of Speculative Poetry, but there was a gap of four years before the next one appeared in Star*Line. Since then many publications have printed my more 'out there' work, (see bibliography), nine poetry collections and one short story collection have seen print, and I've received some positive criticism and award recognition along the way. Contact - goclark@att.net. ***********************************

My son Ian summer 2001