Photo by Larry Mayer

If you’re born in Washington, raised in Texas and spent your adult years in Alaska, California, Kentucky, Ohio and back to Texas and Washington, where do you go when you decide to embark on the writing life?

Montana, of course.

So it is with Craig Lancaster. Born in Lakewood, Washington, in 1970, his life and worldview have been shaped by a wide array of disparate experiences and relationships. As a child, he spent school years in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, with his mother and stepfather. Summers were whiled away in remote outposts of the American West with his father, an itinerant worker. He attended a sprawling, big-box high school. He has repaired the transmission of a Ditch Witch in the oil fields of eastern Colorado. In other words, it’s all good and all worthy.

A natural-born lover of words and information, Craig has been a professional journalist for more than 20 years, plying his trade at newspapers big and small, mostly as an editor but also as a writer. He directed award-winning coverage of the Balco steroids scandal. He covered a spectacularly bad Oakland Raiders season. He spent a week at Pebble Beach and tried to pretend it was work.

Now safely ensconced in Montana, the land he dreamed about as a child, Craig lives in Billings with his wife, Angela, and two first-rate dachshunds, Bodie and Zula. You can catch him on the copy desk of The Billings Gazette, on nearby golf courses and, in the wee hours, at his keyboard, carving away at his fiction. His first novel, 600 Hours of Edward, was a 2009 Montana Honor Book (the only book by a small publisher so recognized) and the 2010 High Plains Book Award winner for best first book. It is available at your local bookseller (on the shelves or by order), through Amazon.com or direct from Riverbend Publishing.

His second novel, The Summer Son, was released in January 2011 by AmazonEncore. Read more about it here.

Thanks for dropping by.