About Brendan

Above photo: Brendan on location for a story in Svalbard.

My Story

Born in Colorado, where my parents worked as journalists on the notorious Rocky Mountain News, I moved at the age of three to downtown Philadelphia, growing up in a rowhome with an alley behind it where I thundered about on my Big Wheel. After my freshman year at Columbia University, I boarded a Greyhound, ending up in the remote fishing village of Sitka, where I worked at the Sheldon Jackson salmon hatchery for a few months before securing a job as a cub reporter for the Daily Sitka Sentinel. To save money for travel I moved into the woods surrounding town, the 17-million acre Tongass rainforest. I lived in a tent, which I promptly burnt down due to inexperience, then a hut of my own making. From there I traveled to China, with the intention of making it overland with $1500 to western Europe. 

I got as far as India. After two weeks of sickness I flew to Russia, then Turkey, ending up in Europe, then the U.S., ready for my second year at Columbia. 

After a year at Columbia, I applied to study for a year at Oxford University, where I joined the boxing team. When Columbia refused to accept credit for the year, I applied directly to Oxford. I took another year to work and make money in Colorado, California, and Central America, before returning to Oxford to finally - seven years later - graduated. 

Carpentry and commercial fishing became the principal methods for supporting my work on my novel. Between writing residencies at MacDowell, Fundacion Valparaiso, Ragdale, Caldera, I fished in Alaska, and worked on carpentry crews. While out on an extended commercial fishing trip aboard the Loon, a troller out of Sitka, I read and reread a book about timber-framing by Tedd Benson. I wrote to him, and he offered me a job at Bensonwood in New Hampshire. 

After a year of working on timber frames I started my own company, Greensaw Design & Build, which worked exclusively with salvaged material. Five years after we began, GSDB employed twenty-four people and grossed about $1.5 million annually. In the meantime I rebuilt the shell of a rowhome in South Philly, and taught Cuban salsa. 

In 2011, I left Greensaw, sold my rowhome, and bought a WWII tugboat in Alaska. I was teaching salsa in Sitka when I met my wife Rachel, who grew up in South Jersey, just over the Ben Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia.

After a couple more years of working on my novel and fishing, I was selected as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. This meant two years in Oakland, a period during which Rachel and I married and had our first child, Haley Marie, before returning to Sitka. 

In 2018, I traveled with my wife, Haley, and our second daughter Kiera-Lee, to Russia as a Fulbright Scholar. There I worked in the archives, researching the Russian boat Neva, which sank off the coast of Alaska in 1813. I also taught literature and philosophy. 

Today, we live in Sitka. My work fishing, building homes, and working on cattle farms continues to inform my writing. Along with Russian, I speak French and Spanish, and can make my way in Italian. I’m a two-stripe blue-belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and enjoy choking and getting choked (though not as much) a couple times a week.