Gary Thompson has been reading and writing poems since grade school back in Michigan.  After completing high school and college in California, he found himself in the MFA Program at the University of Montana, where he studied with Dick Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and Bill Kittredge and was a founding editor of CutBank, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary.  For more than twenty-five years, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at CSU, Chico, all the while playing second-base for The Pests, Chico’s storied softball team.  He and his wife, Linda, have lived in the Northwest for eighteen years; ten years ago they moved to San Juan Island, bringing their old trawler, Keats, home to the waters they love.