
Full Member, Science Fiction/Fantasy Writer's Association.
Member, Northwest Independent Writers Association.
Author Member, Liminal Fiction, A gathering of Speculative Fiction Authors and Readers.
Rowe had a career in a small district energy plant in Eugene, Oregon before downsizing to the coastal town of Winchester Bay, Oregon where he owned a 51 foot commercial fishing boat called the Ceres. He left the coast after the COVID years due to economic reality. He then worked at a big box home store in Portland, Oregon and now is a full-time author. Retired. That's the word. Retired.
He was a nuclear power plant operator serving aboard the USS Norfolk, SSN 714, in the U. S. Navy.
Rowe says of himself:
I’m writing all of the time. I may not be sitting at the computer with a document open, but I’m thinking about my characters and their issues, and how to resolve their problems all of the time. I started ‘thinking’ about "Paradigm Lost, Jamari and the Manhood Rites, Part I" FIVE years before I ever wrote down a single word. I talked about it with friends and partners. In my life, I relate things that happen to me as a gay man to what those events would feel like to the characters in my novel. When I finally sat down to put it all ‘on paper’, I had the bulk of it completed in three months and then spent the next 4 months polishing, cutting, pasting, etc.
As I have completed several novels, the next one is growing in importance with each passing day that I spend on promotions and the ‘business’ side of this endeavor. The characters are beginning to haunt my dreams at night. “Where are you?” they want to know. “When are we coming out again? When do we get to start the next adventure?” A couple seem to sense that things aren’t going to go well for them. They seem to be offering other options . . .
I have had a difficult time in applying my work to any specific genre. It contains elements of Magical Realism, Post Apocalypse (Dystopian), Science Fiction, Survivalist, Fantasy, Spiritual, LGBTQ and even a bit of Naturalist. What I really set out to do was to allow readers to see culture in a new way; to see sex in a new way, perhaps even to develop their own understanding of the beauty of that very human endeavor. The secondary goal was to make homosexuality normal. In order to accomplish these two goals I had to build a society that had discarded our current taboos and strictures. I had to destroy the culture I was raised up in and then create an entirely new culture from scratch.
How long have I known I was going to write? I thought I would want to write as far back as 7th grade. I enjoyed reading so much that I actually got reprimanded for reading in class at times. I suspect if I had been reading the text assigned it would have been okay, but, I was addicted to fiction early and upgraded to Science Fiction early in High School. I wrote many short stories and poems in H.S. I won several writing contests and was given a scholarship to college based on my writing. The most important thing I ever heard about writing though was that I needed to live a little bit before I would have anything interesting to say. In retrospect, I always could say something accurately and with flair, but, I did need to live a little in order to develop my story-line and know how to present it so it gets the attention it deserves.
Books By R. Roderick Rowe
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Summary: Justin Earl Knight, The Founder works with his son Rodney and a gifted healer, Peter, to rebuild the Elk Creek Tribe's community from the ashes of a series of quakes that devastate their land. We first meet Justin here when his mother summons he and his five siblings to a church celebration in 2012. There, Justin recalls his past with that church and meets a fanatic who tries to take his spirit down. Justin uses the strength of his own faith to fight off a demon and then must decide whether real family has value in a world of rejection and abuse. "The First Knight Shaman" is told from Rodney Knight's view. Peter's entry into manhood is the primary focus of "The Second Book of the Knight Shamans." Here, in "The Third Book of the Knight Shamans," Justin is the focus as he works through religious fanaticism and resurgent diseases to save the small community he founded only years before the great quakes devastated the western United States. Together, they discover their best chance of survival relies on ancient spiritualism and shamanism. Then they discover the religion which had dominated their world in the centuries before the cataclysm has fallen when Peter meets a fallen archangel in his quest to get a medical doctorate in the far-off city-state of Reno. In the end, we begin to question if Rodney were truly the first Knight Shaman, or if it was Justin himself as he negotiates his own path of spirituality from amongst the religion his culture imprinted onto him.
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Summary: 1100 years into our future, in a culture where ear buds are constantly fed the latest government sludge, one man is asked to venture into a wilderness. A wilderness where technology is anathema, and where he must learn to think his own thoughts again. It's the year 3115,and Priest-Applicant Justice Preston is sent to the ancient home of the Jamari to research his life and deeds. It seems straight forward until... A church gone rogue. An unexpected discovery of Fae. A murderous bishop. His boyfriend and guide introduces him to the people known as the Tuatha De Cernon. Stagmen. Fauns. Satyrs. Pixies, dryads, nymphs and others. These people have come through a portal opened by the legendary Jamari a thousand years before. They've been living amongst us in secret for all this time. And he discovers ancient memoirs written by the Sophia Shaman, boon companion to the Jamari. In her own words he finds proof the Church of Jamari has been subverting the teachings of the legend they claim to follow. Any rumor of this discovery will bring the inquisition and the enforcer priests into his life in dangerous and deadly ways. He can turn the fragile relics over to the church knowing they'll never be seen again. Or, he can find a way to make them public and become HERETIC.

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Summary: Cernon is an ancient deity whose people fled the European Steppes to America thousands of years before the last great ice age. For millennia he and his people dwelt in the western United States. Then came the white people and Cernon's people began to die out. With fewer and fewer followers, Cernon's presence began to fade in the world. He faded into only an occasional ghostly image for a hundred years. Then the founder of the Elk Creek Tribe of Oregon built a window between the worlds and invited Cernon through. In "Cernon" the Sophia Shaman of the Elk Creek Tribe of 2163 tells of a journey Cernon took her on. Tens of thousands of years into the past, likely on a different continent, they meet a small tribe of cave dwellers on the verge of extinction as an ice age approaches. Sophia immediately sets out to help this people. When she finally stops to think, she wonders, did she start something rolling along the waves of time, or did time capture her as a tool to shape the world? Cernon is listed as the first book of the Paradigm Lost Series. Not because it was the first book written, nor because it's the first in the timeline, but instead, because it's a short novella that introduces two characters who play roles throughout the long future-history of the Elk Creek Tribe. World-shaping roles!

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Summary: In post-apocalyptic Oregon, a forest paradise is surrounded by lands gutted from corporate greed. One tribe holds the hope of a new future for mankind. One young man becomes paramount in returning human spirituality to a hostile world. But first, he must find himself. Embedded in this culmination of an adventure trilogy that spans the life of a boy transitioning into a powerful man, find a love story that spans more than a lifetime is revealed. Find a path of redemption for a lost soul. Join kindred spirits as Jamari is joined by Rodney, the First Knight Shaman; Peter, the Second Knight Shaman; Terry, the Third Knight Shaman; and the Sophia Shaman as they discover and investigate a new portal into the Other Worlds of shamanic lore. When Jamari's wandering spirit is called back into the mortal realm from a near disastrous loss to godhood in the Upper World, does he resent what he's lost, or does he build on what he's learned? Wait, back to the mortal realm? When did he leave? THAT's the story!

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Summary: In 2115, Jamari enters the challenges of the Manhood Rites for the Elk Creek Tribe of southern Oregon. After a series of tests and challenges, he is accepted into the young men's hall in the tribal seat of Milltown. In a post-apocalyptic world, Jamari must learn how to face the challenges of his times. He joins his mentor Shane and some new-found friends as he enters into tribal management lessons including forestry, crop management, militia leader, and the Night Studies. The night studies will teach him eros and how to please others in mankind's most valued trait: sexual studies. With a full day of classes, adventures, and expeditions, he also has the eros lessons at night. What's a poor boy to do when he's so busy? Jamari discovers an innate talent as a shaman and this changes everything he expected from his world. He's taken under the wing of the famed Peter Shaman, once the Second Knight Shaman of the entire tribe and joins an expedition to the Oregon coast to render salt. Along the way, he discovers new peoples, new lands, new cultures and expectations. Then, after a successful negotiation with a coast tribe, disaster strikes and Jamari must set aside his boyhood and embrace his shaman powers.



