The best way to really appreciate the beach is to live as far away from it as you possibly can, so I live in Nebraska with Candy, my wife of thirty-five years, and with one very fortunate goldendoodle. We have four children who could not be less alike.

As a kid, my Dad yanked us out of school for two weeks every year to drive the primitive roads from New Jersey to Florida. The mountains do not constantly, suddenly change, but the ocean does. And there is that line, that tide line that you can walk right up to and then look out over something overwhelmingly powerful and primordial. After I “grew up,” my brother turned me onto a beach that he said reminded him of long-ago Florida: Surfside Beach, South Carolina. We started vacationing as a family in Surfside Beach, South Carolina almost thirty years ago. Precisely one million memories were made there. In 2000, we bought that blue beach house on the cover of the book. 

Fishing is workingman Zen. After you’ve been at it, a good long while, you begin to realize that it’s not about you, it’s about reading what’s going on around you and responding to it.  You go out there each time with arms outstretched to receive the blessing, and yet you may well trudge home accursed. You don’t know. You just don’t know. And you also don’t know what you might catch, or what you won’t — the unseen monsters that you are at liberty to mythologize. I’m a big fan of Jesus. I went from altar boy to agnostic to proselytizing atheist. And then, in a moment one morning in a bathroom in an apartment on Farnam Street, I had my own Damascus road experience. 

 I get most of my best ideas in the shower, which is why I have dry skin. I want to give every character a fighting chance. A story to me is giving a character something to figure out, and then seeing what happens. I think that most people feel misunderstood, and that one single fact affects how we all get along with each other. So few people seem genuinely hopeful. I try to be a God-fearing man, and one of the beautiful dividends that comes from that is the feeling that the miraculous is imminent. 

 Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow is probably my favorite book. The Adventures of Augie March is right up there too. I love Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.  This is a book about someone who is a seeker their entire life. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – yes, a Twain fan too. Before I ever ran into Dickens or Victor Hugo or the vast Russian cabal, I met Mark Twain. Broad and funny; coarse and American but observing his world, and sometimes heart-breaking too. It was Twain that made me want to write. Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Cat’s Cradle, and just about anything else he ever wrote.  I wrote to him once, and he was kind enough to write back. 

I’ve become fascinated with aging in America. You escape the gravitational pull of certain things. The mirror becomes less important. You don’t have to fight about…everything.  You can dwell on a memory from college instead of where you need to be in fifteen minutes. You talk to God more. I want to examine that crossing from middle to old age. Because it seems that in our culture, older people become invisible, on a conveyor belt headed to the dump. And I really like to drink wine.