Throw the Books at ‘Em

Two new books bearing my name on the cover will land this spring. That’s a lot of words. A lot of pages. A lot of, well, me. I’m reminded of the duo of simultaneous Fyre Festival documentaries from some years back. Whether my subject matter (VB as a surf destination and my life as a surfer) is equally fraudulent is debatable, but that isn’t the point. I didn’t set out to create either book. In both cases, they sort of found me. Now, rather than celebrating their arrival as an achievement, I feel the need to apologize.

When I quit teaching in the summer of 2024, I had no intention of publishing anything. I soon ran into a friend, Trey Highton, who’d been looking to create a coffee table book celebrating Virginia Beach’s incredible surf culture. Preoccupied with a demanding job and raising two young children, Trey struggled to find the time to get it going. We got together and made a plan to start interviewing people, even bringing on a young local photographer, Andrew Tonra, to document all of it. The next thing I knew, I was neck deep in the process, and Trey was nowhere to be found. 

I ended up completing interviews with 50 surfers who either live in our area or did at one time. I did my best to bring in voices from across the spectrum in order to illustrate the rich cultural tapestry of our surfing community. In the end, I couldn’t be more proud of what came out of it. At 224 pages and brimming with over 400 photographs, Virginia is for Surfers is a weighty homage to the characters who make our town a hub for wave riding on the East Coast. I brought my son Grady on to design the book, and it’s due to arrive at the end of this week.

Going back a few years to 2020, a global pandemic had transferred me from the classroom to the sofa. With the future of civilization in question and my students sleeping through zoom classes, I did what anyone would do. I reflected, a lot. Thinking that my children might one day be curious about their dad, I expanded on those reflections for the next several months. I dug deeper into my life experiences, all through the lens of the year I decided to quit surfing back in 2014. The process proved emotional and cathartic, but I had no plans to do anything with the resulting product.

The document sat in my hard drive for four years, aside from sharing it with a few people close to me. One of them told me, “This is amazing. Every surfer should read it.” Another, who appears prominently in my story, said, “It’s good, but you make me sound like a dick.” I heard the bit about it being good and glossed over the second part.

Just before taking on the coffee table project, I dug up the document and sent it to a few publishers. DAP Books, an independent publishing house founded by an absolute badass named Sequoia Schmidt when she was just 16, deemed my story worth sharing. As strange as it feels to send something so personal out into the world, I feel this book is full of lessons that people can relate to. It’s a journey across many facets of surfing, and it provides some perspective into our relationship with riding waves. How Surfing Ruined My Life is due to arrive this May.

Having two books hit the shelves within a couple of months of one another is a rarity for any author, especially an author who didn’t plan on one. Frankly, this sudden barrage makes me a little uneasy. I’m someone who doesn’t like to put myself out there, and I cringe in the face of attention. All of this has served to remind me, after a 15-year hiatus, that I enjoy writing. While I can say with certainty that you won’t see any more books from me this year, I can’t make any promises beyond that.