William Penwell

William Penwell spent thirty years in mortgage lending and fintech. It is a business people think is about money and is really about paper — who owns a thing, who says they own it, and what somebody filed away without thought, and which is now unclear.

Some years ago he went to a hill town in Calabria with his wife to look for her grandmother's birth record.

He had expected a database. What he got was a register, bound and enormous, carried out and set on a desk and opened flat. The entry was in ink. It had been written by a man who had no idea anyone would ever come looking, on an ordinary morning, in a town of a few hundred people, and it had been sitting there being true the entire time — through a war, through an ocean crossing, through a whole life lived under a different sky, through the death of the woman it described.

A clerk turned the book around so they could read the name.

He has been thinking about that afternoon ever since, and eventually it turned into this.

He writes about small towns with something underneath them. His characters are mostly past forty, on the theory that the interesting part of a life starts after you have already been wrong about something that mattered.

He lives in Michigan and enjoys life and his family a great deal.