About Brian

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Contents:
| Myself | My work | My writing | Other interests |

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Myself:

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I hail from Redwood City, California, and am a library specialist by profession and a writer by inclination. I work at Stanford University.

I am blessed with a wonderful family and four cats, Asteria (Astra), Abracadabra (Abra), Kiefer and Hobbit — new additions in 2007 and 2008 in the cases of the first two, and 2009 for the others. Our much missed older kitties, Ubiquitous (U), Amnesia (Mi) and Perspicacity (Purr), passed away in 2004, 2005, and 2008, respectively. 

I have gathered together more information on the Kunde family for those who are interested.

Aside from those already mentioned, locales associated with me or my family include Palo Alto, Union City, Mountain House, Tracy, Yuba City, San Francisco, Bakersfield and Carlsbad in California, Honolulu in Hawaii, Kwajalein in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and Belmont in Massachusetts.

I entered the work world as a store clerk in Portola Valley. Later I was a researcher for Elizabeth Hone, an author of natural history articles, and volunteered at the J. W. Mailliard Library at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, where I helped my mentor and friend Ben Elkus catalog the historically important Charles de Young Elkus papers, an archive on his father's work with American Indians. An article stemming from my involvement in this project appeared in the Academy’s volunteer newsletter Environs in 1987.

The Elkus project started me on the path to my present profession as a library specialist.¹ As such, I have worked at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, and the Stanford University Libraries, Stanford University. At Stanford I started out in the Catalog Department in the Serials Cataloging section (later Serials and Electronic Resources). Currently I am in the Serials and Acquisitions Department’s Serial Receiving section.

My primary passion is writing. I have been composing stories and occasional newspaper articles since my pre-teens. I took up poetry in 1992. That year also saw the beginning of a period of collaboration in fiction with Geoffrey Skinner), a former Stanford co-worker. In 1994 I became a publisher under the imprint of Fleabonnet Press, through which some of my work is currently available. The following year I helped establish the Spilt Ink Writers’ Group.

Currently I pen fiction, nonfiction and poetry, have a few novels in various states of completion, and produce literary articles for Wikipedia. I have published eighteen chapbooks of my poetry and prose as well as material by other authors through Fleabonnet Press. My work has also appeared in SUL News Notes, SUL/AIR News, College & Research Libraries News, Calliope, and The Trail Companion.

Other writing-related projects have included the creation of a website on The Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century and editing a four volume edition of the short stories of Mary Tappan Wright.

These include books, genealogy, history, geography, religion, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, astronomy, environmentalism, and political reform. I am also an artist and enjoy travel.

Places I have visited in my travels include most of the United States outside the southeast, four of the Hawaiian Islands, four Canadian provinces, Mexico, nine European countries, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

More specifically, in the United States I have been to Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii (islands of Hawaii, Kauai, Maui, and Oahu), Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Johnston Atoll (a small U.S. posession in the Pacific Ocean), Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

In Canada I have visited Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec.

In Mexico I have toured the Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua, just over the border from El Paso, Texas. (This was way before the place got scary.)

In Europe I have visited Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Monaco, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

In the Marshall Islands I have been to Majuro Island, the capital, plus several of the islands of Kwajalein Atoll, including Kwajalein, Eybye, Bigej, Roi-Namur, and Meck.

1. <— A library specialist (or library technical assistant) is a person who works in a library and actually does library work — unlike a librarian, who is generally a persion working in a library who doesn’t do library work (the primary exception to the rule being a reference librarian).  I realize this is counterintuitive to what most people would assume, and if you want to think of me as a librarian I won’t hold it against you.  For the record, however, most people holding the title of a “real” librarian are actually library administrators.  Since I got into the profession to do library work rather than administrative work, I’m a library specialist rather than a librarian. <—

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