Michael Hopping has always aimed high. Sometimes it pays off. In 1974 he was accepted into medical school at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and then into the prestigious Menninger Foundation for residency training in general psychiatry. More often though, he just aims high.

It made him a lousy duck hunter. For him, hunting was less about killing than satisfying a desire to touch the mystery of wild things—reduce to possession was the terminology then in vogue—if only in broken form. But the ducks usually didn’t fall for it. So he turned to carving birds out of wood. A passable hand with knife and chisel, he was less successful as a painter of feathers. The illusion of iridescence escaped him as readily as the ducks.

In later years, Hopping developed a bit more respect for other living things and developed new outlets for his curiosity. After completing psychiatric residency in 1982 he moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and worked at Blue Ridge Center, the public community mental health service for Buncombe and three adjacent counties. He left medical practice in 2001 when the powers-that-be in the state forced the public system onto a collision course with privatized disaster. Since then, his pen has celebrated its freedom from Big Pharma by capturing the wild things of the imagination on paper.

Michael Hopping’s news feature stories have become a staple of The Indie, a multicultural paper published in Asheville, NC. He’s also been a frequent contributor of political commentary to the Asheville Citizen-Times. His short fiction has appeared in the zine Spoiled Ink and an Asheville literary start-up, Wander.  Hopping was a semi-finalist in the 2003 H. E. Francis Literary Competition. Other work received honorable mention in 2002 and 2003 Writer’s Workshop contests. His first novel, Meet Me In Paradise, was published by WastelandRunes in August, 2007.