William Alan Webb

A successful DNA splice in early 1955 led to Bill’s birth later that year, which led his mother to trying an old Greek and Roman custom she’d read about: exposure. When the neighbor called the cops, she quickly brought him back inside and raised him to be a fine, upstanding young man, well-educated, polite, and ambitious. That it didn’t work out that way was not her fault. After using his high school years to best advantage by playing chess and reading X-Men, chiefly during Spanish class, college found him searching for the right major. Entering the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Forestry came first among the fields of study, until he discovered that science courses had a lot of negative requirements, like work, so by a process of elimination he wound up majoring in Creative Writing. Then his parents gave him some sage advice, “you can flunk out closer to home for a lot less money.” Thus began his career at the University of Memphis. The rest is history, messy, complicated history, with marriage, kids, jobs, and stuff like that, but history, nonetheless. He still likes X-Men.