Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Acceptance

A very special mahalo nui loa to the Boston Globe, the Horn Book, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award committee for bestowing this great honor upon Lord of the Deep. If I had a glass of smooth Merlot, I’d raise it in toast to all the writers out there struggling to put something meaningful into words. It’s a worthy endeavor, and I salute you.

This is an extraordinary moment. That I became a writer is almost laughable. I didn’t read as a kid. I surfed and dreamed about girls all of my teenage years. In college, I flunked English — twice. I sat in the back row in every class I ever took, trying to stay awake.

Fortunately, I caught on to learning, and graduated with honors — which utterly amazed me.

At age thirty, I caught the reading bug, and my life changed in a major way: I wanted to write. So I did, and I do, with help from my team.

My family is the most important part of my team, because without the warmth, understanding, love, and stability of normal family life, I’d be nothing but pulp. They’ve lived with space-dad, traveling-dad, workaholic-dad, and, sometimes, very-happy-dad. I can’t say I didn’t get any complaints, but I always got the time and space I needed to do my work. My family is my rock.

Then there’s my publisher. I’ve been with Delacorte Press for my entire career, and I’ve been advised and guided by a host of supportive and responsive professionals. We’re a team.

I’d especially like to thank Terry Borzumato, Adrienne Waintraub, Ashley Caro, Judith Haut, Melanie Chang, Andrew Smith, Beverly Horowitz, Michelle Poploff, and Chip Gibson, our good-natured leader. And also, a huge thank you to Craig Virden and George Nicholson, who gambled and brought me aboard. I am forever in your debt.

I’ve had three wonderful agents — Emmy Jacobson of Curtis Brown; Fran Lebowitz of Writers House; and, now, Jennifer Flannery of Flannery Literary. Thank you Emmy, Fran, and tireless Jenn.

And always, there is Wendy Lamb — my friend, editor, and strongest advocate. We’ve been working together since day one of my writing career. More than anyone else, she’s taught me how to craft a solid story. The best advice she ever gave me was this: fall in love with your book.

Yeah.

Whatever success I’ve stumbled into I owe to my team. Thank you, gang. It’s been a great ride.

Lord of the Deep started out as a memoir. I had a fabulous youth. I lived in paradise, just before the tourist boom changed Hawaii’s landscape. I worked on boats, and fished, and surfed with sharks not twenty feet away. I watched a volcano blow its stack. I stumbled through the heartbreaking debris of a huge tsunami and rode horses on the slopes of Mauna Kea.

I lived by the silent code of boyhood and before the age of twelve had had almost no adult supervision. I also lived by a silent code my mother taught me, and that was: don’t you dare tell anyone what you feel. Never ever ever. Because if they don’t like it, they’ll bite your head off. She taught me that when I was about six years old, coming down on me like a hammer when I innocently told her that I wished my dad were more like my friend Bobby’s dad, because he took us everywhere. She thought that was a terrible thing to say, and told me so in very loud words.

That was the day Lord of the Deep was born.

In the seventh grade, Mom sent me off to a boys’ prep school in a small town in the middle of a huge cattle ranch on the island of Hawaii. There, I followed the crowd, never speaking up, never challenging anyone, never showing any moral or ethical courage. I was background, like elevator music. But for the first time in my life I came face to face with a new concept — limits. Rules.

We had to eat with silverware.

We had to endure white-glove dormitory inspections every Saturday morning.

We had to stand when an adult entered the room.

We had to go to church.

We had to say, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir.”

We had to study, for cripes sake.

And I never had so much fun in my life.

But there was more. Our headmaster, James Monroe Taylor.

Mr. Taylor ran a tight ship and held firmly to his beliefs, and we paid dearly for breaking his rules. But he punished us with his heart, not his mind. And he told us things I’d never heard before.

He liked to drive small groups of us to his home on Sunday afternoons, lurching his boat of a car up into the eucalyptus trees, where his house sat facing the snow-capped elegance of Mauna Kea. We rode squished together in the car, and those unlucky slobs in the front seat had to squish up against him, and he had dizzying b.o. I remember that. And he drove like a wound-up kid who’d just gotten his driver’s license.

But he gave us new concepts during those Sunday afternoon fireside chats, as he called them. He talked about honor. Integrity. He talked about soaring and making your life matter, making it count. “Hitch your wagon to a star,” he’d preach.

Of course, it was our duty as seventh-grade idiots to take everything he said back to our dormitory and destroy it.

But by some miracle, his words managed to cling to the microscopic sliver of gelatin that was my brain at that time: You have the power to choose what’s right.

Make your life count.

You Are Important.

What you have to say matters.

You matter.

You’ll find his name in the dedication to Lord of the Deep. Because Lord of the Deep is about integrity, and if Mr. Taylor was about anything, he was about that — saying what you mean and meaning what you say — the polar opposite of what I was all about at that age. Mikey’s age.

When I decided to write Lord of the Deep as a memoir, I dreamed of doing what Frank Conroy did in Stop-Time, or Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life — two books on my all-time-favorites list. I wanted to write my life as a boy, and focus on how I struggled fruitlessly to please my silent stepfather, who oozed machismo.

Wendy returned my first draft, saying, This has no heartbeat; the characters aren’t real yet. I thought back to the first draft of Under the Blood-Red Sun, and how Wendy had sent that back, too, saying it was kind of stiff. Bones with no flesh. But I stayed with that story, and, finally, through a change in point of view, I found its beating heart.

So I kept trying, writing draft after draft of stillborn memoir. Lord of the Deep never took on the life it needed to be a satisfying story. But, dang, I wanted to write it!

I thought I had a great title. We even had the cover art, which is what you see on the book today. I tacked a color copy of it up near my desk to remind me of that kid behind the wheel. Those troubled eyes. The empty horizon behind him. What was his story? That boy haunted me as I put the manuscript aside and went on to other books.

A few years later, I wrote a short story about a couple of louts catching a record fish, then lying about how they caught it, and driving the young deckhand nuts.

And BOOM! That was that kid’s story.

That was the kid behind the wheel!

I was on my way, because now I could now write about fishing, which as a teenager, I lived and loved and hated, working for my silent stepfather. The problem with the memoir was that I could not write about me, nor could I write about my stepfather. Or even the shadowy figures of my mom and sisters.

I had to write it from the perspective of what I know today. Because as a kid, I was closed. Sheltered and protected by walls I’d built around myself.

No, Lord of the Deep had to be fiction. It was the only way. Because for years, even well into adulthood, I feared telling anyone what I believed, what I thought, what I liked and didn’t like. I spent all of my energy trying to make the people around me happy so I wouldn’t get hammered ever again. And for a long time I didn’t know I was doing this. Which is probably why my memoir failed.

Mikey in Lord of the Deep is the boy I needed to be. Bill, his stepfather, is the father I never had. And the answers to their dilemma had to test the themes of love, integrity, and cowardice — themes with great meaning in my own life. Some people just don’t get Lord of the Deep. They want the pat ending. They want Mikey to lambaste Bill. But I say, How do you simply go after someone you love like that? Especially when there are extenuating circumstances that you barely understand, but know are there?

For me, real life is often gray. And the answers in Lord of the Deep are quite gray. You sort of have to lay it out on the table and think about, then discuss it.

And I like that.

Every weekday morning at around six o’clock, I drive five minutes to my studio, which is a small cabana built on a pier out over the water in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Its beauty is in its solitude.

There, my job is to go “inside the diamond,” as Gary Paulsen once told me. Go in there and find something meaningful to explore in fiction. It’s not hard, because my life is littered with flaws, and my flaws are my treasures.

As a boy, I did a ton of dumb things. And my mom was too caught up in her own problems to worry much about me. But it wasn’t neglect. She was a great, loving mother, and I wish she were alive today to share this moment with me.

I like to think of my boyhood freedom as her gift, because it forced me to make my own decisions. Sometimes I made good ones; often I did not.

Mr. Taylor’s gift was a value system, and along with it, the tools to help me make better choices.

And that’s what I like to write about: kids facing choices.

Like Mikey in Lord of the Deep, we choose to make our lives count. Or not. And though the answers in Lord of the Deep are gray, and readers have to sort it all out for themselves, I hope they will clearly see that in choosing to love and honor Bill Monks as his father, Mikey has made the right decision.

As for me? Well . . . I want to be like Mikey.