Keith Yocum

Keith Yocum was born in 1951 in Ridgecrest, California, the civilian town supporting the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert. His father, an electrician and former WWII submariner, in 1944 married an Aussie nurse he met in an Australian military hospital. From China Lake his father moved his family to the Panama Canal Zone in the mid-1950s, with brief stints in Western Australia, St. Louis, MO, and numerous moves throughout the Canal Zone. Keith attended parochial and public schools in the Canal Zone and experienced both the easy-going prevailing colonial lifestyle of that period, along with the darker side of the Cold War. In 1958 he and other second graders at Ancon Elementary were accidentally tear gassed during leftist anti-government riots. Several years later Keith and friends would sneak into the tall grass at the edge of Albrook Air Force Base and watch the petrifying slow U-2 reconnaissance jets take off to overfly Cuba during the Missile Crisis. In the early 1960s his family moved to Northern Virginia where his father worked as a civilian electrician for the military. In 1967 the family moved to an obscure Naval submarine communications station in the desert of Western Australia to be close to his mother's family. Keith attended a Christian Brothers boarding school near Perth, Western Australia and took up several sports including rugby, where he was chosen to represent the state in the junior rugby squad championships in Tasmania. During his two years at the boarding school he started writing a diary, and has never been able to kick the habit of writing since. After returning to States in 1969 he finished high school and attended George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. An early English major, he switched to philosophy in a fit of pique when a professor wouldn't let him into a high-level creative writing course. Nevertheless he wrote film reviews for the college newspaper and managed, through a high draft number, to miss serving in Vietnam. After college he decided that journalism was the only profession that actually paid someone to write, and he got a Master's Degree in journalism. He followed his girlfriend, later his wife, to Boston in the late 1970s and worked off and on for local weeklies -- one of which he launched himself -- finally settling at the Boston Globe where he worked for 11 years. He now works for a medical publication but in his spare time has churned out three novels, one of which was recently published.