The Distance Between Places

I was born in Midlands, England. I lived in New Zealand for eight years, then in Ontario for five, and I write now from near Portland, Oregon. They are not the same place. But the rooms are similar, places where the landscape teaches you to be quiet, where the weather has opinions and the mountains are old, where strangers will sit beside you without speaking and you will both feel less alone than when you arrived.

Bear Country, the third book in The Bear Hunt Stories, is out today. It is set in central Oregon, at a queer festival in a meadow outside the small town of Oakridge. There is a character in it named Augie who has loved a man named Wes for two years and has never danced with him in public. The whole book is about the distance between those two facts.

I write about distances. Every book I have written, across every series, is about the distance between what people do when no one is watching and what they let other people see. The Rourke Correlation novels make this question about power. The Hollowmere books make it about dread. The Lexingfield Murders make it about truth. The Bear Hunt Stories make it about love. I did not plan it that way. It is where my attention goes.

Thirteen years of watching countries I was not from, learning to read silences that did not belong to me, will do something to a writer's eye. I do not think I could have written this book without that time. Bear Country is set in Oregon, but the way it watches its characters — slowly, from the side, with a certain reserve — is the way I learned to watch.

If you have read The Bear Hunt and Hunting the Silver Fox, the cast in Bear Country will mostly be familiar. If you have not, the book stands alone. Each can be read by itself; together they form one larger arc.

It is the warmest book I have written.

A note for those of you who came to me through Caleb Rourke, or Hollowmere, or Lexingfield, and find the queer romance line a little outside your usual territory. Every book I have written is about the same thing, just at a different temperature. If the question of what people do when no one is watching interests you, Bear Country will be worth your time.

The book is available today in e-book, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon, with paperback and hardcover coming to other retailers soon. The Kindle edition is in Kindle Unlimited for the launch period. Three years of work, twenty-five chapters, one meadow outside Oakridge.

Thank you for being here and letting me share my writing journey with you.

Yours,

Elias

P.S. A few of you have asked whether Bear Country is the end of The Bear Hunt Stories. The honest answer is that I do not yet know. There is a thread that did not quite resolve at the close of this book, a friend named Miller, a forestry professor named Reuben, a phone call neither of them is sure what to do with. If a fourth book comes, that is where it starts. But what I have written, as written, stands on its own. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.