Leland Parsons, author of The Truth Behind Tommy's Island and Catnip Bill, grew up exploring the marshes and clam flats around Gloucester, Massachusetts. He started his career as a shipwright at the age of seventeen, and went on to build houses, office buildings, bridges and high rises. He and his wife, Cecily, a former ballerina and Registered Nurse, lived fifteen years aboard the Frank Edmund, a sixty-six-foot gaff-rigged schooner they built from scratch in their own backyard. Parsons is a sailor, a carpenter, and a life-long teller of tales.