Born and raised on the far South Side of Chicago, Pascal Marco grew up in the "Calumet Region" where, prior to the EPA's arrival, steel mills shamelessly yet proudly belched orange particulates around the clock from scores of smoke stacks.  Neighborhood saloons book-ended most city blocks, which held tidy brick homes with plush and neatly manicured lawns.

It was a place where formal education usually stopped after high school and a future was determined more by whom one knew rather than what. It was a rough area where folks didn’t really trust strangers.



Called the "East Side," residents usually read the obituary section of the newspaper first--wondering who had died, when they’d be waked, and where they’d be buried--making locals curious if the dearly departed had found a way of leaving the neighborhood sooner than them.

Pascal's East Side was a place surely responsible in helping create his vivid imagination, and he's thankful to this very day he grew up there, proud of his working class roots.

Gently coerced by his wife to move to the Sonoran Desert in 1994, he dutifully followed her to a brave new world in Arizona. Here, Pascal returned to writing, especially fiction, a passion which re-emerged after having relinquished a budding wordsmith career in the sixth grade.

This trauma had occured when one of the good sisters at St. Francis de Sales caught him filling steno pads with graphic stories about secret agents rather than making better use of his time by reading his Baltimore Catechism. Promptly poking her bony finger in his chest, the nun scolded him to “quit wasting your time writing that trash,” scarring the impressionable youth. 

Nonetheless, some habits die hard (what a great pun, eh?) and Pascal now spends as much free time as he can writing and not thinking about scary old women in dark brown habits. 

He does still dwell upon, though, where he’ll be waked and buried.

(Center and above) Pascal's house on the East Side's Avenue "N," like in "Nancy."