Me ...
My name is Mark Travis. I am 67, and I’ve been telling stories since the day my high school English teacher, Mister Brennan, stood at the front of the room and read my homework assignment to the class. The assignment was to describe someone we knew, so I described Mister Brennan. When he got to the part about his “well-defined potbelly,” the cheerleader sitting next to me laughed out loud. That’s all the encouragement I’ve ever needed.
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My wife, Brenda, and I live on the edge of the woods on a quiet road in Canterbury, a little town in central New Hampshire. Our children, Ben and Leanna, are grown. Both live close by in Massachusetts, which makes us happy. Their partners, Liz and Ryan, make us happy too.
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By the way, that's me with my grandfather, Lewis Travis. "Tooth for a tooth," my mom wrote on the back on the photo. It was my first Thanksgiving; he died before Christmas.
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... & My Stories
Newspaper days
2 books & a booklet
We Meet Again
Back to school
Freelance finale
For most of my career I worked as a newspaper reporter and editor at the Valley News, what's now the Tampa Bay Times, and the Concord Monitor. My work was recognized with a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 2002-03.
Along the way I wrote two books, one nonfiction, one fiction, and both grounded in the Civil War. Later I wrote a history of the Shaker Village in Canterbury, where we live.
In April of 2010, on my 53rd birthday, a doctor told me I had an acute form of leukemia. I survived. Six years later, on the anniversary of the death of a fellow cancer traveler and good friend, Greg Grappone, I began a series of blog posts reflecting on my experience. These are three of my favorites.
Over four years, I stretched my skills as a writer with graduate classes in Dartmouth's Master in the Art of Liberal Studies program. I didn't graduate, but I enjoyed interacting with classmates, made a lasting friend—and wrote some stories I'm proud of.
I closed my career by returning to where it began: with reporting and writing. I wrote several magazine articles, ghostwrote ten books, and edited several others. I made some good friends doing that work too.