Family Romance

Nick Patterson is a visual artist whose love of twisting minds and turning heads has led him to explore all the darkness the human experience can muster, through high contrast ink drawings. With no official training in the visual medium, Patterson’s art is loosely tethered to reality, although it is very detailed. His inspiration is drawn from an amalgam of cartoons, comics, and movies. Carrying a sketchbook with him everywhere, he lets no flicker of imagination escape. Nick Patterson’s art has been published in several small magazines and novels. He currently lives in a city full of flowers on the western edge of Canada. Tom Bradley taught British and American literature to Chinese graduate students in the years leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was politely invited to leave China after burning a batch of student essays about the democracy movement rather than surrendering them to ＂the leaders.＂ He wound up teaching conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese ＂imperial university.＂ Tom is a former lounge harpist. During his pre-exilic period, he played his own transcriptions of Bach and Debussy in a Salt Lake City synagogue that had been transformed into a pricey watering hole by a nephew of the Shah of Iran. Family Romance is Tom’s twentieth published book.