Me, avoiding work at a cafe in Copacabana, Bolivia. It's a long story.

ABOUT ME: I think I meant to be a marine biologist. That was the idea, at least, that led me to my first internship, as a fish counter in the lab of excellent UC Santa Barbara marine scientist Milton Love (author of the book Probably More than You Wanted to Know About the Fishes of the California Coast). My duties as intern were to show up, sit down at a small light table, and put on a pair of gloves, while Dr. Love or his colleagues would dig back into the freezer and emerge to hand me a basketball-sized chunk of frozen inch-long silver fish. Then, using a pair of tweezers I would separate them out (the fish, not Dr. Love and his colleagues) based on whether they had two spots or three spots. I did this for about two months, after which I pretty much stopped trying to become a marine biologist and decided, what the hell, I'll just try and write for a living.

So that's me: professional writer, amateur marine enthusiast. After a few years in newspapers I went back to school and got a masters degree in journalism at UC Berkeley. Along the way I've written for the Los Angeles Times, Canoe & Kayak magazine, California magazine, San Francisco magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones, and others. I've written one book, an adventure-travel-biography-history called Darwin Slept Here (Overlook Press, available February 2009), which I believe is the first biography of Charles Darwin to really analyze, via first-person experience, how much Darwin would have enjoyed the mud-wrestling clubs of Buenos Aires. A special section I put together for the Bay Area newspaper chain ANG, on the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers Flight, won the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association 2004 national award for excellence in aviation coverage; I was unable to attend the award ceremony because at the time I was on the Amazon River in a canoe. My surrogate, however, wore a tux.

For more work background, here's a resume. Contact me at eric.simons@gmail.com