Robert Dresner, Author
Robert Dresner grew up in the Bronx, across the street from the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Gardens. As he remembers it, “It was a good place to live and a great place to leave.”
Robert spent nearly four years in India (“East of logic,” as he describes it) asking a remarkable assortment of wise men and colorful charlatans a lot of questions about the nature of human consciousness. Leaving India, Robert realized that God would have to find him.
He returned to America and settled in Colorado, where he built a successful contracting business as he honed his talent—quietly writing eight novels, engaging with literary agents he didn’t like.
Frustrated by the “business” of writing, Robert eventually founded Virga Press and subsequently published these eight novels to remarkable reviews. He became the best-selling local author in Boulder, Colorado, and continued to refine each book until they rivaled, and even surpassed, the best work published in New York.
“The same DNA literally runs through each book,” he says. “The hero of one book may be the grandmother of an antagonist in another book. The Astral series was the culmination of them all …”
The common theme that continues to captivate readers is his extraordinary ability to profile the human condition from many points of view: from a junkie jazz musician struggling to live another day, to an old rabbi who finds God in the heart of his worst enemy, to the heroes of our future, taking off on the first manned mission to Mars.
Robert admits that writing these books was not an easy task because of his obsession with detail, and an incessant drive to create something new and challenging. “The same DNA literally runs through each book,” he says. “The hero of one book may be the grandmother of an antagonist in another book. The Astral series was the culmination of them all, requiring all my talent and energy to create something entirely new, characters in a sci-fi novel that often reads like a chamber play: emotive characters who connect with women readers as well as men, which is something revolutionary in the genre, and the attempt to integrate cutting edge science with religious faith.”
Combining the tenets of five major religions with cutting edge science and highly-developed characters, it seems Robert Dresner has already succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Having completed three novels in the series, Robert is already deep into the fourth book, scheduled for release in 2014.
“Hard though it was, it would not have been possible without the unerring help of family and friends,” Robert says. “The process gave me a lot and it took a lot away, and it was these loving relationships that provided a much-needed fulcrum of stability and filled the void.”
After all, life does have an unfailing ability to whittle away the whittler. But Robert avidly states that he wouldn’t have it any other way: spending his youth in search of something miraculous, then finding himself at a desk thirty years later, writing his seventh novel—this creative process has been a coming of age story in and of its self!
