Miksha was born in a farm house in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, one of ten children in a poor rural family living along the edge of the Appalachian Mountains.
His popular book, Bad Beekeeping, describes the ten years Miksha lived and farmed in Val Marie, Saskatchewan, a remote prairie village surrounded by badlands and large cattle ranches.
The area, part of the Palliser Triangle, is prone to extreme drought as depicted in Miksha's book.
It espouses a strong libertarian '"small government" philosophy and has been both condemned and praised by readers on opposite ends of that discussion.
In 2007, he made two trips to Lima, Peru, South America, for the Canadian International Development Agency to teach aspects of geophysics and wrote The Mountain Mystery, a history of plate tectonics theory, in 2014.