Who is A.J.S. Harper?

She spent the first half of her adult life as a professional writer churning out articles, procedures, instructions, curricula, manuals, and miscellaneous reference works: publications that lined the bookshelves of corporate libraries, cluttered the desks of office employees, and piled up in the corners of control rooms and operator workstations in various southwest Ohio locations.

Then she retired.

Now a full-time storyteller, Harper writes on-the-edge narratives that are more than entertaining: stories with gravitational pull. (At least, that’s how she sees them in her head.)

Why does she write fiction?

Once you step into the world of an on-the-edge story,  its irresistible force tips you off-balance and tumbles you into the unknown, unable to stop until you find out what outrageous, hilarious, insanely clever, heart-breaking, mind-wrenching, soul-stirring, lovely, alliterative, or metaphorically compelling bits of prose or poetry will break your landing by making you laugh. Or by tearing out your heart.

And that’s why she writes. To share stories that throw back curtains and open windows on unknown or unexplored or sometimes even unimagined vistas.  To share stories that come from the shadows just beyond the edges of the flickering campfire light, from the edges where imagination and wonder meet reality.

She writes because a story is “the shortest distance between a human being and truth” (Anthony DeMello). And fiction, whatever its length, “is a pack of lies howling for the truth” (Carlos Fuentes).

She writes to share stories with people who love the power of story.