The Mahogany Door

Mark was born in Durham, NC on April 15, 1970 where he lived until the age of two. His parents then moved to Eden, NC for six years where his imagination started to take hold as he and his friends on Fairway Street explored many different worlds on the double dead end road. After a two year layover in Greensboro, Mark and his family moved back to Durham where he spent the formidable and wonderful years of Junior High and High School through the 1980’s. Mark earned a scholarship to play football in college in 1988, but due to lack of interest in a game that became a job, Mark joined the Navy where he met friends that would last a lifetime. The decade of the 1990’s saw Mark removed from North Carolina where he finally graduated from a small, beautiful college in Athens, WV called Concord University in 1997 with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and an Associate’s degree in Office Supervision. After many life changing events, Mark found himself back in North Carolina where he moved to the coastal town of Wilmington where the love of the beach he attained as a child building his family’s beach house in Stump was rekindled. After the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Mark’s roots as a military man, the creative juices he first found in Junior High, and the serenity of beach life became manifested as pen took to paper in the development of The Bruinduer Narrative. The first 157 page draft turned into three distinct stories in which the first tale, The Mahogany Door, bloomed into a full grown children’s fantasy novel with plans for the other two books in the works. After professional choices, Mark then moved back to the RTP area of North Carolina in 2004. During his first few years back, Mark earned a Master’s in Health Administration degree from Pfeiffer University where he learned to polish his writing skills. Mark is now happily married and back in Durham, where he and his wife, Jill, live with twin orange tabby valociraptors named Garfield and Heathcliff.