Bernie Hafeli graduated from the University of Michigan in 1972. In 2006 he received his MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. In between he wrote advertising, so you might say he's been creating fiction all his life. In addition to Bear Season (Broken Bird Press, 2013), he's published eight short stories and one poem in literary journals. "What stands out for me--both in how I became a writer and in how I became published writer--is how a seemingly bad experience (losing a job, having a novel rejected, losing an agent) paved the way for an extremely good experience. I'm sure this happens all the time, but in my life before fiction writing I rarely, if ever, noticed it. Now I'm on the lookout all the time. To paraphrase Henry James, 'A writer should be someone on whom nothing is lost.'"