Biography
Born in Oregon, Mark Biskeborn moved to the San Joaquin Valley when his parents opted for a warmer climate. He first began writing and reading intensively at the start of high school. During two of his summer vacations, he worked at Das Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, the only theater in the world to perform Goethe's Faust in its entirety.
Aside from delivering newspapers while in junior high, the theater at Das Goetheanum was his first work experience.
Out of high school, he moved to Santa Cruz and obtained a BA from the University of California in French and German Literature after studying at the Universitaet Goettingen, Germany, by way of U.C. Berkeley’s exchange program. Out of college, he first landed a job in a software company in Germany while eking out time to write fiction whenever possible.
Later he pursued a marketing career to support his interest in writing, eventually obtaining an MA in Comparative Literature and an MBA in Marketing. He has worked in corporate marketing and lived more than 15 years in France and 5 in Germany where he wrote his first movie scripts and short stories. Living in other cultures gave him the chops to place many of his stories in exotic lands. While in France, he also taught various classes at college level: economics, American literature, writing, and topics in marketing. He has written poetry since an early age.
Over the years, he continues to contribute many non-fiction articles, essays, book reviews, and poetry to various magazine publications and blogs. Since then, he has developed a content-rich blog. Currently he writes essays for various blogs such as smirkingchimp.com, salon.com, dailykos.com, and opednews.com.
Mark began writing Mojave Winds in 2003, inspired by input from war veterans with whom he worked at Intervention Magazine. In particular, he had the unique honor to work with Stewart Nusbaumer, a U.S. Recon Marine veteran of combat in Vietnam who became a top-notch journalist and writer.
Since 2007, Mark already polished the manuscript for his second book, The Sufi's Ghost, a spin-off from Mojave Winds, published in late August. He has finished a collection of short stories, California and Beyond. He has also finished the manuscript for a third thriller, Mexican Trade, while working out the details for this new publication.
With the launch of Mojave Winds, the author and his work began to be featured in various media sources.
For more Press Kit information, see Mojave Winds IN THE MEDIA.
For scheduled public events, see EVENTS CALENDAR.
In his own words...
I first became attracted to creative arts as early as second grade when I drew a pastel crayon rose in a vase and won a blue ribbon for it. Growing up on an edge between a new suburban housing tract and the San Joaquin Valley’s open agricultural fields of rice, tomatoes, grapes—a cornucopia—provided fertile soil to nurture a wild imagination at odds with the routines of public school.
By high school, I wanted to make a living from writing novels. From that point on, writing and reading everything possible became a preoccupation. I even gave up my guitar in order to focus on writing. I committed my greatest folly when I sold my only means of transportation, a 360 Honda motorcycle, in order to study intensive ancient Greek at UC Berkeley. Even while in high school, I wanted to learn the classics. Unfortunately the public schools did not offer such luxuries as ancient Greek and Latin, at least not in Fat City (Stockton, California). Something to do with popular demand? When I finally did find an opportunity to study the classics, it opened my mind to a whole new world of a fascinating language and culture. 
At the time, I believed that a career in academia would be fascinating. I taught two years of German language and literature at the University of Oregon. Yet, after coming from a blue-collar background, I found academia remained an unfamiliar world to me—a place where scholars analyzed literature with thick glasses, forked tongues, and seemingly in denial of any notions about the world around them.
My graduate studies in Comparative Literature occurred in the 1980s when Reaganomics came into vogue—also called neoliberalism, a supply-side perspective on economic policy, based mainly in the Chicago school. Whenever I hear the term supply-side theory these days, I grind my teeth and cringe at favoritism to big, unregulated industries holding out a hand for billions of dollars as a reward for horrible management, making enormous profits by creating industry bubbles, and once burst, making more profits by using taxpayer bailout money to sell high interest-rate loans so they can now wallow in mulit-million dollar bonuses.
The 80s also represent a time of political correctness and when "deconstructionalism" and other such academic exercises in futility were fashionable. By some mysterious means, academia appointed Jacque Derrida as the high one. Mr. Derrida’s apostles, like Paul de Mann, were the post-modern masters of nothingness, attempting to explain the confusing methods of Derrida, the prophet.
The university faculty expected us students to adhere to this methodology by conducting close textual readings with a view to demonstrate how the text is not a straightforward whole but instead contains contradictory meanings. This process shows that any text has more than one interpretation. I could understand this much about deconstructionalism. Anyone who’s read any so-called sacred or holy books, like the Koran, or the Bible, quickly discovers the contradictions and the diverse possibilities for interpretations.
The part I could not handle was the ultimate purpose where the most exquisite level of deconstructing takes the enlightened readers to a point where they discover that a literary text, a story, contains several irreconcilable, contradictory, even incompatible meanings and thus self-destructs into thin air. This state of blissful deconstruction is reserved for only the exclusive circle of the anointed. While these exercises in critical thinking were useful as intellectual gymnastics, the curriculum left me in bewilderment. Coming from a blue-collar background, I stuck to my practical sense of criticism about real world events and political forces.
That’s when I became withdrawn, disconnected from the inner congregation of academia. With my compass of good sense broken, I decided to study literature for my own purpose, to learn how to piece together original stories. So, on a simple minded path, I paid attention to the basic elements, the tools for a writer—plots, characters, and the high-stakes of real-world questions. In short, I threw in the towel on academia and took the bohemian’s path. It contained its own world of make-believe.
Few in the echelons of higher learning dared to refute the accepted gospel. While I found the deconstructionalists’ texts clever, I hardly felt attracted to this type of critical analysis. On the other hand, many of my classmates grouped together and devoted themselves to gobbling up the newly minted catechisms. Today some of them are professors fulfilling their lifelong dream of teaching literature, most likely evangelizing "obscurantisme terroriste." They were the smart ones. I was destined to experience literature from a view of life experience in which people deal with class struggles, political conflicts, racial tensions, inner demons, and the like—not for the sake of afternoon tea cups and cookies.
Since learning German as my first foreign language one word at a time, I’ve come to enjoy the craft of using language to create a yarn. I've made a living from words. First, translating mostly French and German and later composing pages as a copy writer, and arranging them into longer documents as a marketer. After years in marketing, I bit the bullet and started going public with my own stories.
Mojave Winds
In Hombre, John Russell lived many years among the Apache and then inherited property in the white man's world. How a man readapts from one culture to another has always fascinated me. It compelled me to write a book about this. Leveraging my own experience living in Europe and, perhaps more importantly, using stories from my father, who had fought several years in World War II, I began to write Mojave Winds.
Creating the protagonist, Kris Klug, in Mojave Winds, forced me to look closely at post traumatic stress syndrome. Quickly the subject became a more personal issue than I ever dreamed. I discovered how extended combat experience in World War II had affected my father like so many men of his generation. I knew the war had wounded him physically; I could see scars of various sorts on him, some from shrapnel. What I discovered after all these years were the invisible emotional scars, all the symptoms of PTSS—what he called battle fatigue during the rare times he was willing to talk about it.
As a kid, I only assumed that certain quirks in his personality were normal. Only as an adult, learning more about PTSS, did I become aware of his emotional wounds and how they affected him and, consequently the entire family. Before I knew it, I was following the old adage, "write what you know." I simply applied it to the current situation where soldiers are retained for extended combat missions in Iraq by the Stop Loss law which aggravates the emotional strains.
I saw the novel's characters came to life and took the story into places that taught me more about myself and my past. Eighty-eight thousand words later, this piece of fiction had expressed the story in a surprisingly personal way.
Reflecting on my past, it's not surprising I would write about a soldier returning from war. From an early age, I could see firsthand how my father's experiences in WWII had affected him.
Through him, I experienced the anguish in the war stories which he told me near the end of his life. I wanted to express his struggle to deal with his past as a combat soldier. My father and his brothers had served in WWII.
Perhaps most sobering is learning how much America seems to have changed since then. My father held a strong sense of honor. However, in our current conflict in Iraq, there is honor only between the soldiers who fight at their sides in their own units. For most men and women in uniform now, the sense of greater purpose and a just cause has greatly weakened, or altogether vanished.
Everywhere, most people see that the invasion of Iraq had little to do with the 9/11 attack, much less the WMD's, or harboring terrorists. Since the end of WWII, America has become a superpower. Power in Washington seems to have lost the core values of what my father taught me about our country. Hundreds of thousands of innocent children and civilians have died in Iraq. Thousands of well-intended US soldiers have died there and many more return home now seriously wounded both physically and spiritually.
At the end of the day, we have to admit, it's all about the oil. Rather than innovate in energy alternatives—as President Carter warned us in the '70s. Back then, we didn't want to believe it. Since then, our elected officials have whored themselves out to Big Oil and Islamic monarchies, using the U.S. military as a mere security service for petro-dollar profits, sometimes called national interests.
Truth is often simple, although more often concealed. To find the simple truth, though, one need only courage to look. Oh...I sound almost like I'm preaching some unpatriotic drivel, but then I'm only repeating what others are now willing to admit. Only after retiring from government did former Federal Bank Chairman Allen Greenspan admit to this simple truth in his autobiography.
Funny thing is, there's maybe some 3% of the American population out there that still believes the Bush Administration invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein developed WMD's, or helped terrorists. But then, there's a percentage of Americans who also believe that the earth was created when a turtle curried it into existence on its back. Or that God created it in six days and then rested on Sunday. People are free to believe what they want in this country. Think God for that. At the end of the day, though, it's truth that keeps a democracy alive, not reassuring, sentimental fantasies. As patriots, we have to seek the truth, regardless of how naked and raw it be. Sometimes that takes courage. It's required, though, because truth's the thing that sets us free. And America's all about freedom, right?
In Mojave Winds
Young men and women now return to civilian life here in America burned out after extended missions in Afghanistan and in Iraq. They return with combat memories. Such experience can weigh down a soul. At some point, one comes to the question: Why? What was the purpose? Was it justified? The answers have long since been revealed. And that is what makes dealing with combat experience even more toilsome.
Mojave Winds
While launching Mojave Winds, I began a second book.
A Sufi's Ghost sequels Mojave Winds. It takes place mostly in Saudi Arabia. Former Green Beret Larry Larson takes an early retirement from the CIA. Disenchanted from CIA bureaucracy and political correctness, he wants to make some real money from the bounty on the heads of al-Qaeda leaders.
A Sufi's Ghost is a story based loosely on real events in Saudi Arabia, its religion, and its history. Once back in Saudi Arabia, Larson feels compelled to help Carmen escape the country after she leaves her long-since estranged husband, a Prince. Disobeying a husband constitutes a capital crime in many areas of the Middle East. Once she takes to the road, fleeing the country, Carmen finds a trail that takes them both on the adventure of their lifetime, one that could alter the history of religion, especially of Islam.
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