Stevan with his son Samuel at Mt. St. Helens. Photo by Jeannette Worley.
Stevan Nielsen Worley was born to Jeannette Nielsen Worley, a homemaker and artist, and Donald Lewis Worley, a dentist, on June 7, 1947, in Riverside, California.
During his youth his interests inclined toward football, building gliders, model rocketry, photography, and a butterfly collection. He also spent some time making enamels on copper with his grandmother Jo-Jo Nielsen.
At Stanford University he began his lifelong involvement in writing fiction and poetry. After graduation he moved to Aspen, Colorado where he worked as a construction laborer and, along with his future wife, Taj Diffenbaugh, set up a dark room and made black and white photographs, mostly in an 8 x 10 format.
In 1972 he entered the English Literature/Creative Writing program at Indiana University, while his wife Taj worked her way into the graduate print-making program.
After completing their graduate work, the couple moved to Seattle in 1977 and continued to pursue their art and literary interests, while raising their children, Sam and Flora. Stevan wrote several unpublished novels and numerous poems, several of which were published in West Coast journals. Taj's untimely passing from complications of breast cancer in 1987 was a major cusp in Stevan's life, casting him into the role of single parent.
He has been living on Bainbridge Island, Washington, now since 1989, has been married to Siri Halvorsen, the first member of her Norwegian family born in the US, since 1997, and aside from shooting numerous photos, has written many poems and short stories. For 24 years, until his retirement in 2022, he was a programmer/analyst on the Business Intelligence IT team at Virginia Mason Medical Center.
Quote from letter to his mother on her sister Nancy' Cobath's passing: "Times like this I realize how wonderful it was to grow up in a family that had roots in art, you, Nancy, and Jo-Jo, and how the Van de Grift-Nielsen strain of artisthood has had its influence on my life. I will always appreciate that about Nancy. It has been very exciting to see and hear about her projects and I'm sorry she couldn't have had many more."
