#1 Although Saltwater Cowboys touches on several serious topics (environmentalism, commercial fishing restrictions, coastal land development) you use humor throughout the book. Could you talk a little bit about why you chose to address these issues using humor?

I grew up in a very funny family. At least we think we are funny. I learned to joke around at an early age, and everything and everybody have always been fair game. Even now when my family gets together for holiday meals we always end up laughing around the table. So naturally I gave my characters a sense of humor. Not having one gets you put on my do-not-call list instantly.

#2 Why create the fictional town of Crocker Neck? Does it have a real-life counterpart?

There is no "real" Croaker Neck. I've borrowed bits and pieces from any number of soundside towns that have harbors, fish houses, and men who make their living in white boots. The novel locates Croaker Neck in Down East North Carolina, but it could be anywhere from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Florida. Except where the issues have been set in concrete - Atlantic City, for example, or South Florida - the controversial mix of commercial fishing, development, and conservation is in play to a greater or lesser degree almost anywhere on the Mid-Atlantic or Southeast Coast. Or Gloucester, Mass., for that matter.

#3 What does the term Saltwater Cowboys mean? Where does it come from?

One fall day my friend Crawford MacKethan and I were fishing up at Drum Inlet when a guy in a mullet boat came tearing along the back side of Core Banks. He was up on his tower and the jet outdrive was pushing him at a good clip in water about one foot deep. Crawford grinned and said, "Look at that saltwater cowboy go!" This was long before I'd started writing the book, but when I did start I already had the title and that's never changed. (Crawford is a Fayetteville Scot and will probably demand royalties.)

#4 There are many different themes in your book. Perhaps one of the less obvious is the importance a small coastal town, like Croaker Neck, has in the larger world and vice versa. Can you talk about that?

On a purely selfish level, the survival of a place like Croaker Neck is important because it's where I want to live. I grew up in a small town, then lived in Durham, San Francisco, and Chapel Hill. Now I'm back in a small town - to the east of Beaufort - and realize that this is where I belong. Even in Chapel Hill, which is hardly Manhattan, in 15 years I rarely talked to my neighbors. Now I speak to them every day, on both sides. When I'm gone they watch out for my house, my boat, my garden . . . even during a hurricane. So in that respect Croaker Neck is endearing in the way any small town would be, whether it's in northern California or Louisiana. From a writer's point of view (or a cultural point of view, I guess), towns like Croaker Neck are full of living, breathing storytellers. The news that's important here doesn't come from TV or a national newspaper, it comes from the next town over, relayed by neighbors. History is told the same way. I was amazed to find how little of the history of Down East (just as an example) has been written down. Only now are people collecting the stories, just as the old-timers, who remember the days before roads and dingbatters, are dying off. People like Bland Simpson, the historian David Cecelski, and Karen Amspacher at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum are doing their best to get it down before it's too late. And of course David Stick got the jump on everyone.

1 | 2 | 3