Townsend comes from a long line--father, grandfathers and great-grandfathers--of soldiers, American and pre-American. Slavic on his mother's, deep-south redneck on the father's side, his parents managed money poorly, but told stories well. Spare, pithy, lasting the duration of a Pall Mall cigarette, the tales were to entertain while teaching. No one is completely useless, he was told. He can always serve as a bad example. He learned this lesson--storytellers are treasured, liars are vexing and both are often one and the same. The craft is shared; the objective differs.
His stories and novels arise from family history, fables and stories told around the kitchen table as well as his own experi-ences in America's late 20th century ambiguous wars, deceptions and counter-deceptions.
Fluent in Russian and German with a combat vocabulary in French, Townsend is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin (BA), studied at Freies Universitat Berlin (Certifikat), and awarded his MA (Russian Area Studies) from Georgetown University. Since leaving the intelligence business, he has turned his attention to writing stories and essays, an early pas-sion waylaid by life and work.
The Long War is a novel series addressing deception, war and peace in a 20th century world of both contrived and actual moral ambiguity.
Townsend and his wife, Patrice Naparstek, live comforta-bly most anywhere--Rovinj, Croatia; Dresden, Germany; Dubai, UAE; Boulder, Colorado; Semur-en-Auxios, France, Madison, Wisconsin--but return periodically to the northern Wisconsin family farm to breathe deeply.