About the Author
Ron D. Williams writes novels about ordinary people doing work that matters.
Some of that work is a job. A good deal of it is not: a marriage, a friendship kept up for fifty years, an attention paid to somebody nobody else is paying attention to. His characters are plant managers and reporters, retired engineers and small-business owners, four old friends who have kept the same booth for decades, and the person at the edge of a room whom nobody else has thought to notice. They rarely save the world. More often they ask a question, keep a record, sit with somebody, or do a necessary job well when no one is watching.
Ron spent six years in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine force. He came out of it onto a power plant construction crew, doing whatever gets handed to the newest hire there. He finished as the president of a research and consulting company, by way of a career in the electric utility industry that ran from managing power plants to leading large enterprise initiatives. Along the way he became interested not only in machines and organizations but in the people inside them: how they make decisions, how cultures form, how responsibility gets lost, and how much of what keeps an institution functioning depends on work that receives little attention or credit.
He took up long-course triathlon in his early sixties, sedentary and starting from nothing. Fifteen years later he has qualified three times for the Ironman World Championship and completed Escape from Alcatraz at seventy-five.
For most of his working life his writing was technical reports, financial business cases, and expert testimony for regulatory proceedings, a discipline close to the opposite of a novel. He began writing fiction in his early seventies, and had to learn it the way he had learned the rest, badly at first and then less badly.
Ron’s story is about the ordinary kind of persistence, the kind available to anyone: continuing after the novelty is gone and before the result is in, on the days when nothing about it feels like progress. It is what he has relied on. It is also what he gives his characters. They are not gifted people. They are stubborn in a quiet way, and they are still asking after everyone else has stopped.
Landscape is never far from the work. Mountains, desert, rivers, weather, fire and water are more than settings. They are reminders that the world is older and larger than the people moving through it, and that much of a worthwhile life consists of paying close attention to the small part of it temporarily placed in our care.
He lives in the Sierra Nevada with his wife, Barbara, and their dog, Charlie.
A note from Ron.
“The high desert draws me outside. The ranges, the plants and animals, the sunlight and the starlight. The long highways that run from one range to the next across broad basins where you can go an hour without seeing another car, where the silence makes you check your hearing and the far views look close enough to touch.
My wife, Barbara, came out here from New Jersey by way of a career spent advising clients on the other side of the world, and fell in love with this country about as hard as I ever did. Our girl dog is Charlie—large, white, furry, and always ready for a hike.
Most of writing a book, I have found, is staring out a window waiting for the next words to reach my fingertips. I write about people and the things that occupy them: friendship, work, loyalty, curiosity, loss, the places we love, the things we notice, and the small decisions by which we become who we are.
All the people I write about are extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone who is not.
That doesn’t mean they are heroes. Most of them would laugh at the suggestion. They get things wrong. They overlook what is right in front of them. They carry old regrets, make new mistakes, help when they can, and occasionally surprise themselves. They are simply people trying to pay attention and make something worthwhile of the time they have been given.
Perhaps somewhere in these books you will recognize someone you know. I hope, now and then, you recognize yourself—not because you have lived the same life as one of my characters, but because you have wondered about the same things, cared about some of the same people, noticed something beautiful that somebody else walked past, or tried in some small way to leave a person or a place better because you were there.
Thank you for visiting my site. And if you are moved to spend some time with the characters who live in my books, then on their behalf, I wish you happiness, good company, something worth noticing, and a good life.”
––Ron D. Williams