ABOUT SCOTT

I was born in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1953 and grew up in a small town nearby called Albany. When I was 12 our family moved to Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle, where I’ve lived for most of my life.

I studied Russian and journalism at the University of Washington, at first harboring thoughts of joining the CIA, but then deciding to see what a writing career might offer. So I got a job working as a cub reporter for two weekly newspapers in Burns and Redmond, Oregon, then, to recuperate, became a ski bum for a couple of years in Bend, Oregon.

After moving back to Seattle, I dipped my pen in the magazine writer’s well, and wrote a series of long pieces for what was then called Alaska Airlines Magazine, run by an old-school editor who had the audacious idea that airline magazines should publish great journalism and go easy on the travel fluff. He didn’t last long there, but he allowed a cadre of young journalists like me the freedom to pursue unusual and challenging story ideas that would shape who they were to become as writers.

After learning the magazine trade at Alaska Airlines, I went after some bigger game, landing a few assignments with Smithsonian magazine. I wrote a couple of pieces there that I thought were pretty good, one on slugs–both the kind that wreak havoc in your garden and the indigenous variety that a friend once called “monks of the forest,” a nod to their silent, slow, deliberate movements and their sense of utter calmness and tranquility. I also wrote one on tsunamis, which are better known as tidal waves (though they have nothing to do with tides).

In between magazine articles, I did some journalism for Microsoft and the Seattle Times, picking up side jobs wherever I could.

Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense is my first book. I stumbled on the idea a few years ago after watching my father, who was 67 years old at the time, take a bad fall while we were hiking in the Cascade Mountains near my home. It was a shock both to my dad and to me. Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt. But as we were hiking back down the mountain, I realized that ten years ago he wouldn’t have fallen in the same situation. Something about his body had changed that made him more vulnerable to falling. I began wondering what those changes were, what balance was, and if imbalance was an inevitable part of growing old. These were the questions that fueled my curiosity about the subject, but as I began searching for answers I discovered that there was little information out there, and certainly no books. That was the “Aha!” moment that started me on a path to study and write about balance.