I grew up in Poughkeepsie in the Quaker Community there. Our family had a place on an island in Upper Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks. We lost the place later, but The Island still lives in much of what I build, and certainly in The Inland Sea.

I have always been interested in the history and people of New England, and the ideas that took root here. It’s what I studied in school, and read about to this day. I have often attempted to write about this subject, and my own family’s relationship to it, but with little success. I have a drawer full of memoirs, philosophical pieces, stories, and other manuscripts that don’t quite work. But on November 4, 2008, the day Barack Obama was elected, I was hit by a car while biking, not far from my home in Plainfield, Vermont. I couldn’t do any woodworking for a few months, but I could still type. I decided to approach this material again in the form of a mystery novel.

During this period our family had a spot, with a boat, an old house-trailer and a dock in a a lakeside campground called Montani’s, on the eastern side of South Hero, Vermont. This is the part of Lake Champlain known as The Inland Sea. I love the place and also the name. It seemed natural to locate my story there.

It might seem absurd to jump from writing building books to writing a novel, but to me principles to live by, and principles to build by, aren’t that different. You could argue that constructing a detective story isn’t entirely different from constructing a build book, or a house.