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Mary and James Hanna are writers who live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mary C. Hanna
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James E. Hanna
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Autobiography
James E. Hanna

The oldest of three sons of a late foreign service officer and his French-born wife, I grew up in South America, the Middle East, and Europe, coming to live in the United States at the age of 16. By the time I was 2l, I was bored by what I considered to be the relative callowness of American culture. Restless, I left college after my sophomore year and caught a tramp freighter to Australia where I spent seven years in self-imposed exile. My stay, planned originally to be five months, was extended by my stand on the Vietnam War, which I considered to be an encroachment by a power elite in America.

While in Australia, I supported myself with a series of jobs which included cowboy, sheep drover, carnival barker, migrant worker, and deckhand. I also found company in books and undertook to educate myself by reading the classics. On returning from Australia near the end of the war, I volunteered for a two-year stint in the peacetime Army, acquiring a master's degree in criminology after my discharge in 1976. For the twenty years that followed, I was a counselor in a medium security prison near the small town of Plainfield, Indiana. I recently relocated to the San Francisco Bay area with my wife and am presently working as a probation officer in San Francisco.

I have completed a number of short stories, in addition to The Exile, and have generated some interest from literary journals. Three of my stories have been published, to date, and two of these publications were nominated for the Pushcart Prize.