Pleased to announce that Forest of Fortune was named Best Contemporary Fiction by the 2015 San Diego Book Awards. Giving the Finger, the book I co-wrote with Scott Campbell, Jr. tied for first in the Best Memoir category. Incredibly grateful to the San Diego Book Awards Association for the double honor! Forest of Fortune is now available in paperback, hardcover and ebook editions. Giving the Finger is available via hardcover, ebook and audio book.
The Kindle version of Giving the Finger is now just $1.99. Reel yours in today. (See what I did there?) Photo of Dutch Harbor taken during my research trip to the Aleutian Islands in 2012.
Not to state the obvious, but this book was made for Father’s Day. Or you could go with socks. That’s always a safe bet. Sad, but safe.
I sat down with T.C. Porter at San Diego Writers, Ink to talk about the art and craft of memoir writing. We discuss interview stratgeies, book proposal development and the unspeakable horror of the literary life.
One of the strangest things that happened to me last year was a bout of vertigo that literally knocked me on my ass while I was in Walla Walla, Washington interviewing Scott Campbell, Jr. for our book, Giving the Finger. The whole story is in the new issue of Razorcake, which also features a rad interview with punk pop phenom Tony Molina, an oral history of East L.A. punk curated by Alice Bag, and a stunning essay by Cheryl Klein.
Thank you, J.Ryan Stradal for this bracing interview at Hobart. We talk about my experience in the U.S. Navy, crab fishing in Alaska and the weirdness of the Bering Sea.
Before he was a star on Deadliest Catch,Scott Campbell Jr. had a rocky childhood and an even more treacherous path to becoming the captain of his own vessel. He tells his story in Giving the Finger: Risking It All to Fish the World’s Deadliest Sea.
After the deer was dressed, we’d cure it out by hanging it in the rigging. We did this with all the deer, so by the end of the hunt, we’d have a pretty impressive display. If we had a half a dozen or so men aboard, and we each got our quota, we’d come back to Kodiak with thirty to forty deer hanging in the rigging.
I took this photo of the pot yards during my trip to Dutch Harbor last year. Each crab pot is eight feet tall, weighs about 800 pounds and when fully rigged costs about $2,000. When the pots are not being used they’re stored in stacks that resemble ruined cities, ghostly and beautiful.
First review of Giving the Finger
Review of Giving the Finger (978-0-7627-9131-6): To fish the Bering Sea in January is scarcely short of suicideâequal parts insanity, courage, and incurable love of the water. A Deadliest Catch star, Campbell Jr. writes as well as he fishes, and thatâs saying something.