About the Author
Justin Cronk
The life behind the books
I grew up in a house where my parents always had their noses in a book. My father was a writer himself. He composed prose and poetry while working in the Sahara Desert, inspired by the landscape and by Hemingway. Stories were not entertainment. They were how you made sense of being alive.
In 2004 I was overseas with the military. I walked through palaces in Baghdad. Real palaces, built for real kings. Something about the scale of them, the silence inside them, the way power leaves a residue on stone, stayed with me. It is in the bones of Man Amongst the Clouds.
I have worked for a uranium exploration company in Colorado and Utah, finding chip piles in the desert where someone had knapped an arrowhead hundreds of years ago. I worked at a remote camp in Nunavut, Canada, where an Inuit man whistled and called in the northern lights. I still cannot explain it. I will say to this day that it was magic.
A good portion of the first novel was written in a canvas hot tent in the woods outside Boonville, New York. In winter. The company I was working for paid for hotels. I turned them down. I needed the struggle of it. I needed to feel the weather on the other side of the canvas to write about people who lived close to the world.
I live in Minnesota now, with my family. Most of what I write these days starts somewhere within driving distance of the house. The Pond at the Edge of Everything is set in a backyard in Zimmerman. So is The Lottery. The ground matters to me.
The books
Man Amongst the Clouds took nine years. It almost died. It sat for a long time under life, under doubt, under the weight of a thing that felt too big to finish. What brought it back was my son, Carter, who started writing his own novel and reminded me what it felt like to believe a story was worth finishing.
The Pond at the Edge of Everything is a middle-grade novel set in a backyard in Zimmerman. The Lottery is something else entirely. A LitRPG thriller about a framer from Minnesota and the worst day of his life. Another novel is finished and on the desk. More on that when there is more to say.
I co-founded Stillfire Press with Carter. It is a small indie imprint, not a real publishing company, and I have no interest in publishing anyone else. I just wanted a name to put on the spine that belonged to us.
Research and influences
The first novel draws from years of obsessive research across Traditional Chinese Medicine's Five Element Theory, real alchemical processes called spagyrics, herbalism, medieval timber construction, the world's largest castles, garnet crystals used in aggressive magic, and color correspondences in metalwork.
I was shaped by Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey. Not just as a narrative structure, but as a way of understanding what people go through when they are called to become something they did not know they could be. That framework sits underneath almost everything I write.
Contact
For press, rights, collaboration, or just to say hello:
justincronk@pm.me