Marlin Bree is a bold storyteller – one might even say brash – who creates excitement in his sea tales whether on salt water or fresh.
Several offerings in his newly released book, Bold Sea Stories, will be familiar to Lake Superior Magazine readers; versions of them have appeared in the magazine. Still, if you’ve read these before, they will be worth rereading. This collection of 21 adventures – some
unintentionally of his own making on his wood-epoxy hulled sloop Persistence, and some the stories from other people’s history – will keep you page-turning away those hours at home.
The 21 stories, published in various periodicals, have garnered 23 awards for their author, including two Grand Prize Awards from Boating Writers International. We caught up with the former Minneapolis Tribune writer via email with some questions about how he decides what makes a good sea story for his non-fiction works, what his saltwater readers think about his Lake Superior tales and other questions about his work and his honors.
Following are Marlin's thoughts based on the questions we sent him:
What do I look for in a good sea story? I look for resonance – a story that sticks with me and sometimes haunts me. Often, these are stories of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary ordeals and summon up the courage, ingenuity, and determination to survive. For example, an elderly man on the North Shore discovers that a fellow villager is missing, takes his old skiff into an oncoming storm, and almost ends up as a block of ice in this ultimate survival situation (The Old Man and the Inland Sea). Or the seaman who went down with his ship one dark and stormy night but somehow survived on an open iron raft as his shipmates around him froze one by one (Courage of the Sole Survivor.) These stories resonate in my mind and in my heart.
Real-life adventures are much more fascinating to me than fiction, and Lake Superior has a lot of stories to uncover. I once worked in Duluth, and I lived in an unused boathouse on the North Shore. As I stared out at mighty Superior, sometimes in her many moods, I often wondered what tales were out there. Now I know some of them.
When I was with the Minneapolis Tribune, I had to write under deadline pressure. But being a book writer now, I can let a story evolve in my mind, and I can also take the time to probe into the story at leisure. It's a lot like carving a statue out of a block of marble: you just cut away everything that isn't a statue. That takes time and patience. I rewrite the beginning graphs the most, and that is sometimes 25 to 30 times. I was inspired by a famous author who once said he looked for "one true thing." It's like you are following a path in the north woods, having the trail disappear and you search about, and then – joyously – you discover the path again. It's there in writing as it is in life.
When the action gets hottest, my words get fewest. I do not want to get in the way of what's going on: the story coming off the pages and going into the readers' minds.
Frightened on Superior? Oh, yes. I remember the advice from a school teacher who built a 10-foot plywood boat and went sailing, not on the world's biggest freshwater lake, but on the North Atlantic and the South Pacific. Gerry Spiess said that just about everyone who goes out the Duluth entryway and onto the open waters feels a certain puckering of the tail feathers. (Not exact nautical terminology). A feeling of fright was natural. It was not fear that was important; it was what you did with it.
For example, on the Fourth of July, a strange storm popped over the Sawtooth Mountains as I neared the U.S./Canadian border. It slammed into my 20-foot centerboard boat and tossed me below into the cabin. I raised my head to see that the portlight had turned green. My boat's
side was underwater. We were in danger of rolling over with me inside. Stunned, I somehow roused myself. The scene that greeted me in the cockpit was that we were balancing on the edge of control (and eternity). My boat and I faced "the storm of the century" – the historic derecho of July 4, 1999, that many Lake Superior Magazine readers will recall. What helped me survive? Two things: first, my mind was in part conditioned for the actual danger. I knew some things to do, and that others had survived similar situations. You can learn from sea stories.
If you only sail in Superior's protected harbors, on sunny sailing days, you may never experience the delights and the extremes of Superior's open waters. There is an adage: Don't worry about finding a storm on Superior. Sail long enough on Superior and a storm will find you."
The beauty of the Lake and the experience of being out on the fresh water have restorative powers. They do for me. There are worse things in life than facing physical dangers.
I have been writing my sea stories for several decades now, and I was surprised that the national saltwater magazines would publish my Superior tales. But readers grew enthusiastic for the freshwater world that I discovered from the cockpit of my own boat. Storms. Sailing adventures (The Day Superior Went Wild.) Places to sail – interesting places – that they had never heard of before (The Island of Doom.) They were inspired by my sail into one of Lake Superior's most beautiful areas and one of the world's lesser-known places to cruise, the Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area. It is a wild archipelago of fresh water, shoreline and islands as unchanged as when the ancient voyageurs paddled through in their birchbark canoes. It is now the largest freshwater marine protected area in the world. I remember talking to a Canadian boating friend of mine from Thunder Bay. I had sailed through the area before it became the NSNMC.
"So has it changed?" I asked. "Are there barbed wire fences and Mounties guarding the gates?"
"Naw," he replied. "It's pretty much the way you found it. Wilderness. And we want to keep it that way."
How well do the freshwater tales rate? That surprised me. One day I got an e-mail from the
professional international boating writers organization I belong to that told me I had won some kind of award. And off I jetted, which I dislike, to beautiful Fort Lauderdale to receive what I found out was the Grand Prize Award. It is the highest honor that BWI can give a writer. It was also the first BWI Grand Prize Award ever awarded for a freshwater story.
Chairman Jim Rhodes wrote: "The visual image of the old man frozen to his seat in the skiff, his head bowed, covered with frost will stick with you for a long time. After reading this story, I had to sit in front of a roaring fire at least an hour to get the chill out of my bones." (Lake Superior Magazine published that article in a different form and entered it in another writing contest where it won a Bronze Award.)
I thought that winning the awards was some kind of fluke, but then another freshwater tale (The Day Superior Went Wild) won another BWI Grand Prize Award. This made two sea tales awarded the highest honors of the writer's outfit – both are freshwater tales. Said the judge: "The writing is vivid about what the sailor was seeing, feeling and thinking – all providing insights and lessons for others who could as find themselves int the eye of the storm."
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You can find more about Marlin and his work at his Author's Guild website, www.marlinbree.com.