D.A. Schippers

There is a layer of the Bläckwood Universe that the FAQ does not name and the homepage prose only gestures toward. The bio page is where it gets said.
The current Butcher's name is David Compeau. The first name is the writer's. The surname is the writer's bloodline.
Schippers is the surname carried in this writer's institutional life — on diplomas, on professional credentials, on the spine of nine nonfiction books, on the contracts of the academic role this writer holds. Compeau is the surname that runs deeper. It is the patrilineal name that should have been carried forward, the bloodline that traces back through this writer's father to generations of Compeaus before him. Circumstance changed the surname carried forward in one generation. The change was administrative and familial and ordinary, the kind of change that happens to many families across the twentieth century without anyone marking it as significant. But the Compeau bloodline is real, and it is this writer's.
The Compeau line that has carried the Butcher's mantle across centuries and continents — the bloodline named in the FAQ, the bloodline that runs through forests sharing the same primordial pact under different names — is not invented from external mythological sources. It is the writer's own ancestral material, used here in fictional form, given a mythological architecture large enough to carry the weight that paperwork and family circumstance had compressed into a single severed surname.

The current Butcher — David Compeau, who walks the marked forests in the modern day, who has answered the call when the forest summoned him, who carries the axe knowing what it costs — carries this writer's first name on the figure who is, in the Jungian sense, the writer's literary shadow. The figure renders the accountings the writer's institutional life has structured around but cannot directly inhabit. The figure operates by the ancient code older than the institutions civilization built. The figure carries the bloodline restored.
For readers, the question of how deeply this autobiography runs is left open. David Compeau the Butcher is either a literary shadow of the writer or an amalgamation of the writer and others — real people who seeded particular elements of his character development, particular features of how he carries the mantle, particular pieces of his moral architecture. Which version is closer to the truth is something readers will work out across the books over time. The historical Butchers earlier in the bloodline — the Compeaus who carried the mantle in the medieval period, in World War II, in the deeper centuries — were similarly seeded. More will be revealed over time about the depth of integration and the historical impact that the bloodline has carried forward across its centuries of work in the marked forests.

The Bläckwood Universe is not entirely fiction. It is what happens when a writer with a severed bloodline takes up Jungian active imagination as a creative practice and discovers that the figures who emerge are carrying material older than the writer himself — material that was in the bloodline before the bloodline was administratively renamed, material that the unconscious has been holding until the conscious mind built the mythological architecture large enough to receive it. The shadow work is real. The bloodline is real. The integration is ongoing. The books are how it gets written into existence.

The Butcher knows. The forest remembers. The accounting is being kept.