Patrick Lane was born in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada, on March 26, 1939.  He has no formal education beyond high school in Vernon, B.C. . From 1957 to 1968 with his young wife, Mary, he raised three children and began working at a variety of jobs from common laborer, truck driver, Cat skinner, chokerman, boxcar loader, and Industrial First-Aid Man in the northern bush, and as a petty clerk at a number of sawmills in the Interior of British Columbia. He has been a salesman, office manager, and an Industrial Accountant. In 1968 he divorced his first wife. Much of his life after 1968 has been spent as an itinerant poet, wandering over three continents and many countries. He began writing with serious intent in 1960, practicing his craft late at night in small-town western Canada until he moved to Vancouver in 1964 to work and to join in with the new generation of artists and writers who were coming of age in the early Sixties.