Growing up on the scarred shores of Staten Island, New York in the 1960s, I didn’t know what a salmon was. What I knew about fish was that you couldn’t eat them if you caught them, those being the days of heavy industrial pollution in the waters surrounding the big city.

Coming to Oregon opened me up to new experiences, including fishing for salmon in the coastal streams, along with the Clackamas (where I caught my first steelhead), the Sandy and the Deschutes rivers. I started volunteering with Oregon Trout and its later offshoots. And I met Guido Rahr when I was looking for potential stories about salmon that I could propose to magazines.

As a journalist and, later, a fiction writer, I wrote plenty of stories that got published. I’d never written a novel, but I wanted to. Just needed a big idea. And then, one day, driving, I had an epiphany: I could write about two things I loved—salmon and Oregon—in a book.

Nearly 20 years later, on March 12, 2020, I celebrated the publication of ­Sockeye.

Sockeye is my novel about one man’s attempt to restore a sockeye run to a lake in eastern Oregon. 

In the book, I use the salmon life cycle as a sort of template for a hero’s journey. The hero of the story has been away from his Oregon home for 10 years, fishing in Alaska, when he returns for a sad homecoming to bury his father. What happens in the ensuing pages is all about the pull of home waters and a deep connection to the land.

There’s no way I could have written Sockeye without all my life experiences. Not having grown up with salmon, I saw salmon and their story through fresh and wondrous eyes. Salmon provided the inspiration that pulled me through the writing, editing, marketing and final publication of Sockeye.

I hope Sockeye will inspire you. I will donate 10 percent of all proceeds from print sales of Sockeye during May 2020 to the Wild Salmon Center. Sockeye is available from Powells.com, Amazon.com,BarnesandNoble.com or the publisher.

Photo by Dave on Unsplash