ABOUT R.L. JONES
R.L. Jones was born and raised in the desert southwest, to an unintended tribe.
He grew up in a distant corner of New Mexico under the shadow of the coal burning power plants, gritty oil rigs, and uranium mines that drove the local economies of boom and bust. The land itself was his only escape. The hills, bluffs, and canyons of the parched scrubby earth became a refuge. They seemed to stretch for an eternity into the pastel horizons where they promised solitude and escape.
He grew up in a world edging toward insanity. A world crumbling in on itself. Cults, mass suicides, fervent religiosity, high profile abductions, homegrown terrorists, the ever-present threat of communism and nuclear annihilation, the smoldering hornet's nest of the middle east. All of it playing out to the throbbing disco beat and screeching heavy metal soundtrack of the 70s and 80s and the incessant dispassionate drone of the evening news.
At seventeen he fled to Los Angeles. The stucco facade. An industrial dream factory. A city full of Big Stars, Big Bucks, and Big Dreams. A landscape of sunset beaches and sun-splashed pastel buildings. Bright and shiny on the outside and rotten beneath the surface. A city full of grit and graft. It was the end of an era, the end of the celebration of sex and sensuality as AIDS came along to crash the party. It was the Reagan years, and the birth of religious lunacy. It was the beginning of homelessness and hopelessness. It was punk rock and neon, sex and drugs and rock and roll. It was home. At least for awhile.
With recovery came Atlanta, with her big, humid, embrace, her lazy drawl, her edgy clatter and rhythmic beat. Her arteries clogged and unredeemable. The deep shade of her towering trees welcoming with their comforting shelter. Back to planet earth. Back to life. Back to reality. Now it is home.
Through it all there was China, looming in the background, weaving through his life like a fine silk thread. China, on the rise, on the move. A place as familiar to him as it was foreign.
R.L. Jones resides among the trees in the urban forests of Atlanta, Georgia, with his accountant husband, their two entitled rescue dogs, and a secret society of squirrels and chipmunks.
