About Richard Merrill

Richard Merrill is a writer based in Brooksville, Maine

Richard Merrill is the author, paper engineer and illustrator of two juvenile non-fiction books from Dover: Fantastic Press-Out Flying Birds and Beautiful Press-Out Flying Butterflies.

He grew up in eastern Oregon in a small town in the high desert among cattle ranchers, lumberjacks and sagebrush. He started reading at an early age, and feasted on a wall of books his parents provided without restriction. Everything from Children's Book Club to Howard Pyle's Robin Hood to Gray's Anatomy was fair game. Merrill's parents also provided art supplies and a ream of paper with unrestricted access, leading to cartoons, satirical newspapers, and many, many paper airplanes. A Smith Corona typewriter was the vehicle for Merrill's early writing, chiefly science fiction.

Education

A National Merit Scholar in the '60s, Merrill attended Goddard College in Vermont, where he studied with theater teacher Paul Vela, anthropologist Jules Rabin, and poet Paul Nelson. Richard attended Harvard through a Goddard program, studying paleontology and evolution with noted evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, author of The Panda's Thumb and The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, with with only four or five other students. Add two years at Boston University, and Merrill had racked up far more credits than needed for his BA in Biology.

Career

Merrill has been a puppeteer since childhood, and performed professionally for several years in Maine, presenting a workshop titled "Spiritual Stories in a Secular World" featuring his storytelling character Nasruddin, at Northeast Storytelling's Sharing the Fire storytelling conference.

Before moving to Maine, Richard Merrill was an aerospace and optical designer for Itek Optical Systems, Compugraphic, and Thermo Jarrell Ash in the Route 128 high-tech area around Boston, living in Gloucester where his children were born. With his late wife Carol Cribben-Merrill, a poet published in Mademoiselle and Ploughshares, he recorded an album of Merrill's songs called Sundial, available on Apple Music, YouTube Music, Spotify, and other streaming services.

Since 1994, Merrill has been married to fiber artist, weaver, teacher and author Susan Barrett Merrill. He edited, co-wrote several chapters, and designed Barrett Merrill's book The Art of Weaving a Life, Schiffer Books, 2016.

Richard was a founding member, Chief Marketing Officer, and UI/UX/product designer for environmental monitoring company PowerWise Systems, from 2010 until his retirement in 2024 to pursue creative activities.

Merrill's non-fiction includes a series of commissioned articles for Voices, The Journal of the Academy of Psychotherapists, on handwork and healing; and craft articles for Living Crafts Magazine, summer 2010.

He is working on a epistolary fiction project, The Lost Journals of Nasruddin, comprising extended versions of short traditional tales and original stories featuring Nasruddin (see above).

In the works: Digger, a grounded young adult/older middle grade western sci-fi adventure novel

Think Slow West by John Maclean, but for YA/older MG, with a dinosaur. The story is set in eastern Oregon's high desert (home of the famed John Day Fossil Beds), where Merrill grew up. Drawing on his studies of paleontology, evolution, and biology, the story follows a seventh-grade boy and an eighth-grade girl as they deal with an escalating series of events flowing from a momentous discovery. It is grounded and realistic, with conspiracy and danger, a paleontologist who was one of the first women in the Army Rangers, a dramatic final high-tech confrontation, and a satisfying conclusion.

Details on Merrill's YA/MG novel will be announced later this year.

Contact Richard Merrill