It Makes Me Me
On his excellent STORY CLUB Substack, the writer George Saunders asked subscribers to describe themselves as writers in 150 words or so. This is what I wrote:
I imagine writers as lonely souls on abandoned islands who stuff messages into bottles and fling the bottles into the sea, hoping someone will read the messages inside.
I was a professional journalist for 41 years, writing long-form narratives for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and others. My favorite story was about a black World War II soldier who rescued a Jewish boy from the Holocaust, and how they reunited 50 years later. Two extraordinary people.
I started writing fiction seriously around 2000. My first novel, STARVATION LAKE, published in 2009. It received strong reviews, sold fairly well, and won mystery-thriller prizes. I published four more novels with Simon & Schuster and Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer.
Since leaving journalism in 2020, I’ve written two novels my agent hasn’t seen fit to sell. Chances are slim that I’ll be published again, that I’ll ever fling another bottle off another beach. Yet I keep writing. Because it challenges me. It gives me joy. It makes me me.
