Walter Crabtree came to enjoy writing rather late in his life. He had purchased a sailboat in Southern California and, of necessity, began keeping a tidy log/journal of his cruises. When he was back on land he enjoyed reading the entries made at sea. Later, in an effort to explore the mysteries of constructing stories, Walt attended night classes in a MFA creative writing program at UCI, and adjacent local community colleges. Saul Stein, Jay Gummerman, and Michael Chabon  were some of his instructors.
 
Walter’s career was a well site geologist in Petroleum exploration and traveled broadly in that capacity for some ten years. He returned to California in the mid-sixties and worked in the earth sciences computer section for Occidental Petroleum, later moving into management and continued in that field until retirement.
 
Computers took so much of the clerical tedium out of writing that Walt began composing short stories based on his experiences wildcatting in the Gulf Coast USA area, Canada, Latin America, Amazon Basin, French Oceania, and New Zealand. Unfortunately all his work was lost in a move to a new home. Other interests and activities began taking over the time he had previously allocated to writing, so much so that there was a twenty year hiatus.
 
After he retired Walt's daughter began requesting that he write his memories, as she knew little of his earlier life. Finally, as a new year’s resolution, he wrote some four hundred pages, burned it to DVDs and sent copies to his daughter and son. This exercise renewed his interest of putting into words his observations about the quandaries of human interactions with their environments. Walter especially enjoys the school of magical realism prose ala: Marquez, Borjes, Bulgakov, Haruki, etc.
 
Walter never submitted his stories or poetry to editors… so has no published credits.
 
He now lives in a cabin near Fall Creek Falls State Park on the Cumberland Plateau.

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