John McDonald lives, writes, and paints in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been writing essays and short pieces of fiction and painting in oils, since 1992. John has a BA in Physics from UC Santa Cruz and an MS in Astronomy from SDSU. He has worked at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley, where he is an aerospace engineer. John also spent four years working at an observatory at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
At Berkeley, he assisted in teaching a writing course in the department of architecture, focusing on the environment, how objects are placed and described, and the sense of place in writing. The experience of place, both natural and man-made, and the interaction between the two are themes in John’s writing and painting. His work has been published in journals Clog, Isotope, Out of Line, and Amoskeag, and online in EarthSpeak and Raving Dove. Two other pieces were published by Bona Fide Books in their Tahoe Blues and Permanent Vacation, Volume 2 anthologies, the latter published in June 2018.
John has been working on two manuscripts. One is a partly science-fiction environmental disaster tale set in Boston and Hawaii; the other is a literary fiction story set in a Northern California commune in the 1970s.
