Jim Trainor

I strive to create novels with mystery, romance and realistic, well-developed characters to whom we all can relate. Because of my background as an ordained pastor and as a professional physicist, my stories often touch upon the spiritual and the scientific as they affect the lives of the people in the story.

 

I wrote my first novel when I was five. It was a mystery story with a surprise ending, well at least as surprising as a five-year-old mind can conjure up. It was written in pencil and was three pages long. My mother kept it among her treasures until her dying day.

 

It would be many years later before I would write my second novel. I grew up in the megalopolis of Los Angeles, went to college there, lived there until I was almost thirty. By then I had gotten my doctorate in physics – a far cry from novel writing, well maybe – and headed off to my first real job at the Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago. Over the next two decades I lived in the world of experimental physics, and my profession would take me back to California, then to Los Alamos, New Mexico. For several years I served as deputy division leader for physics at Los Alamos. My love for writing found its way into over seventy scientific articles in physics journals.

 

Things were going well in my physics career, but then I was called into ordained ministry and studied to become an Episcopal priest. As I served parishes in New Mexico, Texas and Wisconsin, I was often asked how someone trained in a field so rational, analytical and solid as physics could embrace something so intuitive, fuzzy and ancient as religion. For years, I had already been pondering that question, and the answer can be found in my first book, Grasp: Making Sense of Science and Spirituality.

 

Now I’ve written six novels: Waverly’s Universe (my first novel since that masterpiece I created when I was five), The Sand People, Up North, The Mountain Goat, 68: a novel, and my newest, Mail Girl.

 

Another interesting thing happened to me during those years at Los Alamos. I met my wife Mary. Today we live in Wisconsin, where we enjoy kayaking, hiking and outdoor photography. We have three grown children.