About

Simon L. Skiles

I was born in 1973 and grew up in Los Angeles County. I've since lived in something like twenty-five places — most of the American West, plus England, Scotland, Greece, Portugal, and Albania. I currently live in Bangor, Maine, in a house built in 1924, and I'm not sure I'll be here next year.

The work I did. BS in Geography from Portland State, 2008. MS in Natural Resource Management from Colorado State, 2012. Fifteen years of GIS: cartographic technician for the Bureau of Land Management, GIS planner for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, GIS planner for the Town of Silver City, and finally senior GIS specialist on the FEMA Hermit's Peak / Calf Canyon restoration. I left that work in July 2026.

The work in between. From 2017 to 2023 I was self-employed doing psychic readings — a few hundred clients, mostly people at a hinge point in their lives who wanted a second read on a decision they'd already half made. I've listed it under other names on other documents. This is the accurate one.

What happened in 2014. I'd had a vision at sixteen, in 1989, that I never found a way to explain. In 2014 it stopped being a memory and became a daily condition. The short version is that I came to understand who I was as a unicorn, and the years since have been about learning to live in a world that has no room for that sentence, while still going to work, paying rent, and being a father.

I don't need you to believe it. I've written it down accurately, which is the only obligation I actually have.

My daughter River died in 2018. Spiritually Awakened is dedicated to her. I don't write about it often and I'm not going to here, but it's the fact that sits underneath most of what came after, and leaving it out would make the rest of this a lie by omission.

Now. I write. I'm finishing the sixth and final book of the Memoirs of a Unicorn series, keeping the Nitya journal, and finishing On Partnership for January.

Get in touch: simonskiles@proton.me

I read everything. I answer most of it.