JAMES DANIEL ECKBLAD has been both ordained minister and trial attorney, with degrees in law and theology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale University, respectively. Having raised four sons in Wisconsin – on hefty helpings of read-aloud novels and stories from the works of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and J.K. Rowling – Eckblad now lives without children with his wife, Mary Ann, across from a vast forest preserve near Chicago (where, incidentally, Eckblad continues to read aloud, but mostly to himself). From Eckblad himself:

I read virtually nothing growing up.  Beginning, however, with the reading of my first novel (that was not a school assignment) at about age thirteen, I have been all about books and writing.  And thus, my bibliophilic journey began with Johnny Tremaine, and has continued ever since with a multitude of marvelous adventures, including some of the best I simply “stumbled upon” in works by the authors mentioned above.  Most notably among works of fiction, if only because many of them are stories I re-read, and so adventures I re-live, there is Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (and only then The Hobbit), Lewis’s Til We Have Faces (and then, much later, Narnia), all of MacDonald’s numerous “fairy tales” and many of his novels, including At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, and Castle Warlock, as well as the fiction of magical realism writer Jorge Borges (beginning with Labyrinths) and the “magical” tales of Isak Dinesen, the novels and short stories of Anton Chekov and Edith Wharton, and both the fictional and non-fictional works by the author of The Little Prince, Antoine de St. Exupery.  It’s only a smattering, but perhaps it gives you a feel for the sorts of things that have apprehended my imagination and passions and shaped my writing.

Over the years I have also read (and continue to re-read extensively) non-fiction works by Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Barth, and of course, George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis, to name just a handful of those thinkers and writers who have shaped both my mind and my heart.

On most days, and as has been the case for many years, you can find me reading from the writings of at least one of the above-noted authors – just as you would have found me most days, and over the course of many years, reading aloud to one or two of my boys while they were not yet out of grade school, not infrequently reading from these same writers, along with many others. And those precious times of reading to my children are memorable if only because when I now read aloud only to myself, I can hear one of my children still interrupting me to remark, on hearing me attempt one of the character’s voices, which I always did for every character, without exception, “No, Dad! It’s not like that! Do it again!”

And then, of course, I write – and extensively so; and without question I write extensively because I read extensively.  And so most days I end up doing mostly what I most love, aside from spending time with family (all of whom also love to read, and some of them to write).

Of course, there are other things I love, like DC3 airplanes and hummingbirds (who, by the way are the only bird in the world that can fly backwards), as well as long motorcycle trips and short trips to the neighborhood pastry shop for crème-filled donuts, and remembering wonderful old smells, and … well, to be continued … perhaps.