TIDE is not an autobiographical novel. I wasn't a marine biology buff growing up, nor was I anywhere near as observant as Miles. But bits of my life and the people I've known are sprinkled throughout the story. When I invented Miles I expected to be entertained by him, but I came to admire him.
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auto-bio
I am drawn to dramatic settings. I get fascinated with places and study them until the characters and stories rise up. As a teenager I was dazzled by the rowdy novels of Tom Robbins and Ken Kesey and the way they made our countryside come alive on the page. By the time I hit college I wanted to write novels. My first real writing was as a reporter in an Alaskan fishing village, but I'd always found ways to write stories during the odd jobs I had before then, including stints as a bellman, a security guard, a salmon cannery worker and a maid at The Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone National Park. And I usually wrote fiction in the mornings before my newspaper jobs, draft after draft, agent after agent. It wasn't some high-minded discipline that kept me rolling. I couldn't resist trying to write a good novel. It's hard to see where you grow up as exotic. What brought Western Washington alive for me were the dozen years I left it to write for newspapers in Virginia, Washington, D.C., eastern Washington and Portland, Oregon. By the time I moved back here, Puget Sound seemed more dazzling than ever. I kept kayaking, sailing and beachcombing until a premise and characters arose clearly enough to write my first novel, "The Highest Tide." I wasn't sure what would come next, but I knew where it would be set. As a reporter, I'd spent time studying the western end of the U.S.-Canadian border, that nonsensical line that tries to follow the 49th parallel from Minnesota to the Pacific. The line overgrows and the two countries are often divided by nothing more than a drainage ditch or nothing at all. I spent time along the border after 9/11 and saw what it was like on both sides after the U.S. Border Patrol tripled its forces. These quiet farmlands had turned into a prime battlefront on the war on terror AND the war on drugs. I started to see provocative material and comic potential. I also soon found myself inventing characters on both sides of the line, including a young, dyslexic 6-foot-8 Border Patrol agent obsessed with birds, and "Border Songs" took shape. I remain inspired by where I live, overlooking this bay at the southern bottom of Puget Sound, which probably means that at some point I will, no doubt, try to set another novel in these waters. |
