John Steiner

John started writing novels in 1998, drawing on experiences of the U.S. Army, martial arts, his biology education, philosophy, and mythology. For the last 20 years he has tutored STEM courses at Salt Lake Community College, where he earned his Associates degree in biology. John’s writing approach is to tell a true story filtered through the exaggeration of science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror. The characters he writes are of diverse backgrounds because that’s where society is necessarily going. He revels in deliberately shredding negative stereotypes and mocking the prejudices based thereon. Among John’s writing guilty pleasures are the legally permissible models of interrogation and military debriefing scenes, because of the psychological techniques to induce accurate memory recall, even against the subject’s wishes.

The music of Bruce Hornsby ignited the fires of his social conscience, and in more recent years he enjoys viking and Mongolian metal as well as anything werewolf related. In recent years he’s made a practice of putting together playlists for his works in progress to help set the mood. John is also a huge fiend for accuracy in science and history, even if those details aren’t explicit in the story he writes. They’re informative to the ambience of a scene and the disposition of the characters in it. John use his real name as his pen name because it’s so close to John Steinbeck that he hopes people come across his work while looking for Steinbeck’s. Many of the narratives he weaves align with Steinbeck in that, often, John writes about the regular common people dealing with uncommon events. Their background struggles serve to empower then against more extraordinary events the story entails. John contributed Stories of the Second Self: Marking the Truth to the e-zine Short Story Issue 2 Vol. 2.