About the Authors

Tom Bentley
Tom Bentley lives in the hinterlands of Watsonville, California, surrounded by strawberry fields and the occasional Airstream. He has run The Write Word, a writing and editing business, out of his home for many years, giving him ample time to vacuum.
His business projects have varied from writing website content, the full spectrum of marketing material, user documentation for software manuals, radio ads, character dialog in video games to editing coffee-table photography books.
He’s published hundreds of freelance pieces—ranging from first-person essays to travel pieces to more journalistic subjects—in newspapers, magazines, and online. (Venues include Writer’s Digest, the Los Angeles Times, Writer’s Market, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, The American Scholar, and many others; he’s also won a number of nonfiction writing awards.)
He’s published short fiction in a number of small journals, and was the 1999 winner of the National Steinbeck Center’s short story contest. His coming of age novel, All Roads Are Circles, was published in 2011. His short-story collection, Flowering and Other Stories, was published by AuthorMike Ink in early 2012. His corral-your-writing-ideas-and-get-them-to-the-page book, Think Like a Writer: How to Write the Stories You See was published in 2015. His novel Aftershock, centered around the shock of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, was published in 2018.
Sign up for his writing-related newsletter and see his lurid website confessions at www.tombentley.com.

Rick Wilson
Rick Wilson lives in the outlands of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, surrounded by a delightful combination of meadows, woodlands, gritty industrial complexes and poorly timed traffic lights. He practices dentistry in his high-tech and human-centered practice, and is involved on a part-time basis in dental education. Rick strives to teach young doctors to see themselves as empowered, to stand for what they believe in, and to trust that so long as they focus on solving problems for their patients, ethically and with compassion, all will come out all right.

He is the author of The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks, a WWII-based anthem to the bespoke man who stands against the dehumanizing forces unleashed by industrialists, communists and politicians. He is currently completing PureBread, a novel set in the same milieu that explores themes of scarcity, and generosity in the midst of scarcity.

Rick loves history, and working history into his writing. He has delved deep into the fabric of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and is fascinated with the peculiar American intersection of capitalism and intolerance which has wielded such powerful influence on our culture. His musings on dentistry, society and medicine, and occasional off-topic themes like how to properly drive an automobile around a corner can be found on his blog at http://www.rickwilsondmd.typepad.com.