“Here’s the hairspring, son: the watch’s clockwork heart. It controls how fast the watch runs, and how long it can go before it stops.”

In the trenches it’s my father’s words that keep me going. Every night I wind the watch, and every morning I wake to face the thunder.

Jeremy Nelson spent most his life in the urban tropics of Hong Kong before life grafted him into the conifer trees of the Pacific Northwest. He received his MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts.