Waters 33

The Invention of Waves

By Jim Waters

You would think that Anderson Walk, given that he was in his 20s in the early 1960s, would have been heavily influenced by the Beat Generation or the Confessional poets. However, that was not the case, the influences most true to his heart being any poems built around a lacing of words that danced on the tongue like chocolate. And so, given that he was a generation behind or a generation ahead, depending on your point of view, he was rarely published. His wife, Maggie, tried to broaden his horizons, gifting him (for example) John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, the “songs” of which he would nod knowingly whenever one of his colleagues mentioned them but of which he had very little true understanding; he only knew that he liked Berryman’s lyricism and his whimsical or inscrutable use of phrasing like “the weather fleured,” “settle & lurk,” and “wicked & away.” (And the ampersands: oh, those were a nice trick!) He, Anderson, in fact, kept his own secret list of words that he found, to his mind anyway, to be small wonders inside the larger wonder that was language, and so it should be no surprise that he called this list “Wonderful Words.” He vowed to himself to use each of them in one poem or another eventually. Each of them was a tender little flower in a field of shamrocks. Almost hidden but not quite.

Take her with you, his wife instructed. She’s ready. And indeed she, Carolyn, was. For such had been the history of her preparedness: Even at just a few weeks old and with her father’s arms folded around her as he dipped himself down into the froth of the waves, only low enough to ensure that her blanket wouldn’t be splashed, she would let blossom a smile that showed excitement and contentedness in equal measure. At two years, whenever they would arrive at the beach, she would toddle quickly ahead of her parents, so keen on chasing the white water out and letting it chase her back in, unaware of opening herself to danger, that Anderson would have to drop all the beach gear he was carrying and follow her to her nirvana. So now, at five, yes, she was ready.

He tried to accustom her to the waves that broke closest to the shore, telling her You need to crouch down, like this, point your arms to the shore, like this, and turn your head back, and wait for me to say When. Get ready, get ready. But after several tries, her laying her body down when his voice exploded with Now! but her only reward being the wave frothing over her and carrying her but a foot or two, she became frustrated and stormed off to sit herself emphatically down on the family’s beach blanket and cross her arms and scowl at the sand. Anderson kept himself patient. An hour later he asked her if she was ready to try again, but she said No and said that she only wanted to punch the waves, which was nothing for the parents to be concerned about as it was a game she’d played many times before. And so she did.

Anderson told himself that they would try again another day, and he helped himself to some bread and brie cheese, which they always brought along to the beach as a mid-afternoon snack.

When he wrote notes to himself about the ocean, the water, a sketching of words that perhaps (sometimes almost certainly) was to become part of a poem one day, Anderson did not include anything about his daughter’s frustrations with the art of riding waves. Whenever she did appear in his notes, it was almost always in the form of her eyes: that (for example) if you looked at them at an angle that was just right, there was not just the reflection of the waves there, there was the truth of the wars there, between water and sand, between sun and water, and those were good wars. Life, he wrote, depends on inexorability.

Carolyn told the other girls on the playground that she was the bestest wave rider ever. And she would demonstrate the crouching. This is how you do it, she told them. And she showed them how to point your head back, and watch and watch and wait, so you would know When. And she always knew When, she told them. She was the bestest.

Maggie Walk, shortly after her son Christian was born, told her best friend, Simone, that she could tell there was something in the way her husband had held their newborn that portended a disconnect between father and son. Carolyn, at the very least, would always be his favorite, that was what she could tell. That’s ridiculous, Simone told her. How would one be able to tell such a thing? Some inhibition in his smile, Maggie insisted. Some way his arms didn’t quite want to curl all around the baby, as they’d done when he’d held Carolyn for the first time. She could remember that. Maggie, Simone said, but Maggie interrupted her and said Oh it’s not a terrible thing. I know And will love him nonetheless (she often called her husband And). It will just mean that it may be me who will need to guide him, to show Christian how to seek out the faces of love. It was something she and her husband agreed on, that the amount of love in the world was greater than the amount of hate. Simone, who secretly held a contrary belief, simply smiled and examined the detritus of tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. She could not know that it was on Anderson’s list of “Wonderful Words.” Detritus.

Anderson did not believe that coincidences had any divine connection, that (even when they had some human connection) they were just that, coincidences. Like a storm that, not because it is listening to a thought from God but because it is 74 degrees in one area and not 75 degrees, will be pulled away from us here on land, to find some serenity in the blue Pacific. Nevertheless, the day that Carolyn, at ten years old, for the first time truly caught and rode a wave, arcing up like a sea bird and coasting some twenty feet, he smiling broadly at her afterwards, pumping his fist, he’d earlier written something in his notes that, when he reread it the next day, made him smile in wonder at the possibility of true coincidence, even prophecy, and it was these words he had written: The blossom of a dandelion between two stepping stones is not grievance for the gardener; it is, rather, bliss for the earth there, to know it gives itself up for something that can reach for the sun without reserve. I, said Anderson to himself as he read the words again, am the earth.

Carolyn knew instantly that she got it. Afterwards, her self-satisfaction took her breath away as surely as had the ride itself. Seeing her father’s celebration, wordless, his arms raised skyward and juddering, she was even more excited for his excitement, and she sloshed through the relentless but wonderful waves toward him. I got it! she shouted before she arrived at him. I, I, and she had to catch her breath again, but she desperately wanted to narrate everything. Everything! I saw a line, she said finally. It was like a line I couldn’t really see but I could, and it was under the water, and I knew that was when I should start swimming to shore. I gave myself up, you know. You know what I mean? Gave myself up. He was impressed that she had used such a phrase, and he knew, he did, knew exactly what she meant. He had been trying for a long time to find the words to impart the instinct that made you feel the water. Feel the loving pressure between air and water and sand and something deeper that the sand was hiding, and know that that was the moment when you knew you had it.

It is impossible to catch more waves than you miss, a fact that Carolyn did not understand that day, but that she would in a time not far away. Even on that day, though, she knew that the resentment she felt toward the waves she missed was diminished, in both measure and pleasure (a phrasing Anderson would have loved), by the ones she had caught.

Anderson loved it when nature bent back against itself. Maggie did not. There was a mesquite tree in their front yard that was the very definition of this glorious aberration: as close as Anderson could figure out, when it was a youngster, winds had blown it in one direction, some time later in another direction, and so on and so on, and the tree, innately understanding that if it did not yield, its end was assured, had simply continued to grow in whatever direction the winds at that time demanded. The result was a trunk that, at six feet from the ground, bent from 12 o’clock to 8 o’clock, then back up again, succumbed to encircling itself at one point, and came down and up again, such that the resulting entanglement (which was fine as far as the tree was concerned) might remind you of the personification of evil presented in some fairy tales. This latter was the opinion that Maggie held on to. She wanted the tree cut down. A nice orange tree would look good there. Anderson said that such a decision should be unanimous. Carolyn voted with her father, Christian with his mother, and the resulting tie meant that nothing about it would be said again for many years.

The disagreement between husband and wife, however, was not entirely innocuous. It was the type of thing that Anderson and Maggie disagreed on frequently, most of the time without resolution. It was the type of thing that, if you weren’t careful, could linger, perhaps fester if you weren’t careful, perhaps feed on itself.

In the summertime, when the weather is high (Anderson and Carolyn sang at the top of their lungs as they drove home from her dance class in his yellow ’63 convertible Corvair), you can stretch right up and touch the sky. However, after You got women, you got women on your mind, Anderson often got the lyrics wrong (for example, screaming out You can take her out to the mill, instead of You can take her out for a meal), and the duet would collapse into laughter, the two of them tickled at his lyrical faux-pas, so much so that his eyes began to water and he had to refocus on the road ahead. It was their inside joke, the cluelessness he brought to song lyrics, and he didn’t mind at all. He was somewhat in awe of the frequency with which they would both hear a new song and say, sometimes in unison, I love that! Or, hearing a song that didn’t appeal to them, simply sit pursing their lips, looking straight ahead, perhaps mulling the reasons for the distaste the song left them with. Sometimes Anderson would put himself in the place of another driver on the road, one who’d pulled up to a stop light and glanced over at this pair singing so loudly, their faces pointed to the sky, they were probably father and daughter, and the laughter from the other driver would be one that appreciated the comradery, one that was a subdued, kind laughter and not a malicious one. Anderson was quite confident of that.

I live in a world of abraded memories. This is what Anderson wrote as a first line for a poem. (Abraded was on his list of “Wonderful Words.” Other A words on the list included alluvial and aquiline. He loved the sound of them more than the meanings. Speaking them aloud gave him the same kind of pleasure he took in reading, for example, a Sylvia Plath poem where she used wonderful words like cacophonous and ebon and wheeling. Despite the pleasure, he was always more than a little jealous that he himself had not written the poem.) Why are his narrator’s memories “abraded”? he asked himself. He needed a second line, and all that he knew was that the persona was not old, was not in danger of losing his or her memories, that it was rather the memories themselves that had worn away, that had fallen into a deception of themselves. Ah well. He would figure it out. He got up to get a Coke from the refrigerator. It was almost time to pick Carolyn up from school, to head to the beach, for she had announced that morning that she had a yearning for the waves, and he had said that was just fine with him. The Coke splashed some of itself on the blue countertop as he popped the cap.

Maggie saw what she saw. Her best friend Simone, she who could not be more opposite to Maggie with her dark hair (not blond), the angularity of her dark facial features (not rounded and shining pink), her tall dark figure confident in its angularity (not short—though Maggie’s was also confident in its power and the pink and resilient grace of her skin), this Simone, coming out of a coffee shop door across the street, the door held open by her husband And, and then chatting with him for a few seconds (their faces shining) before leaning her hand on his arm and kissing him on the cheek and walking off while And, Simone’s lover (Maggie was suddenly sure), walked in the opposite direction. She saw what she saw.

Even as she entered her teenage years, Carolyn was not a particularly froward or insolent child. But she did know what all teenagers know: that their 12 (or 13 or 14) years of experiencing the world counted for more than their parents’ 35 (or 40 or 45) years. Sometimes, you could hear this entrenched belief only in the tone of her voice. Or perhaps, for example, in the way she responded to her parents’ reminders when she said she wanted to go over to her friend Ronelle’s house for a study session. This, this study session, was on a Friday. They (in particular, Maggie) warned her about drugs and boys and the calamity that can be hewn by each. Carolyn thought about saying Like I wouldn’t know that. She thought about saying I have a pretty good brain in my head, wouldn’t you say? I know was what she settled on. Mom, I know.

They had not mentioned alcohol in their litany of admonitions, but this was exactly the temptation presented to her, the one that she wished to resist but that, with the faces of other girls and boys showing her a clear choice between conformity and exile, she could not. Ronelle’s parents had left her alone for the weekend, and their bar was unlocked, an act of trust they placed in the girl. The beer, Carolyn assessed, was detestable; the wine, detestable. Nevertheless, she would take a sip and smile and re-engage, happy in the conversation. A bottle of whiskey was produced. Everyone must take a shot. When a hand pushed a red plastic cup to her face, she waved it away, but the hand kept coming back, and soon she felt all the other faces, star-strewn and giggling, thrusting themselves toward her. Drink, drink, drink was the chant. And suddenly she was being held down and the Crown Royal tilted toward her throat at each point that a scream allowed an opening of her mouth. Ronelle, suddenly angry, pulled the boys, one by one, away from her. Motherfuckers! she screamed. When Carolyn grabbed up her purse and exited the house, she glared as much at Ronelle as at the boys. When she entered her own home, she said Fine to her parents as they asked how the evening had gone. When her mother followed her into her room and asked what was wrong, she said, lying in her bed, facing the wall, Nothing. My stomach feels queasy. Just that. She could feel her mother standing still behind her. Okay, her mother said. You’ll tell me if there’s anything you want to talk about, and Carolyn felt a softness toward her, until her mother added By the way, I can smell the liquor, and then the softness, like a ghost, was gone, and she resisted the temptation to turn to give her mother the most awful look she could call forth. She was glad her father had not come into the room.

Where is my Intro to Poetry class? Anderson wanted to know. The department chair, Gromer, behind his leviathan mahogany desk (his hand stroking the pretentious scrolling along its edges), looked at Anderson with an expression somewhere between annoyance and dismissal. After a few moments, a pause that seemed requisite, he said Look, Anderson, we’ve got that visiting professor this year, you know, this Wingate fellow, and the fact of the matter is, he published a book of poetry last year, well received, and he has another book coming out in November. And sorry to be blunt about it, but your vita is a scattering of publications and a chapbook. (Anderson had the feeling the man wanted to also say A chapbook that received no attention.) We need to give those poetry courses to Wingate. It’ll give the department—Gromer seemed to search for the word—more gravitas. For another fifteen minutes Anderson tried to argue his case (he’d taught that course for years, he had a method, his students liked him), all the while knowing nothing would be changed. As he left, as he crossed the quad, all he could think about was how he would incorporate poetry into his freshman comp courses and how his students would take to it and would love it and how they would write so wonderfully well that Gromer would understand what a dire mistake he’d indeed made.

It was just Anderson and Carolyn this time. Maggie and Christian, she for one reason and he for another, had shown no interest in accompanying them. Anderson caught a wave before Carolyn did. It rolled, and an ice green just below where the white caps were beginning to show themselves gave way, as it rolled, to a Majorelle blue just beneath as it rolled, deep in its curl a green darkness that could no longer stay hidden, for it rolled. It carried him for twenty-five feet. And then Carolyn, moments later, seeing the same (though Anderson couldn’t know that), was carried an equal distance, and the exultation that showed on each of their faces was shared with the other. The waves were perfect, the best they had been (Anderson knew, though Carolyn could not) in years. Nothing that happened on that day could be diminished by anything that happened on any other.

In their brief separation, they had spoken little to none, such a state being merely a vague happenstance for And but a firm condition for Maggie. He would sleep in Christian’s room, she told him the day before his return, for a time, she said, for a time. During all the nights he resided with Christian, the boy asked nothing. Watching TV, Carolyn would lie on the couch, her feet scrunched against her father’s knees, uncomplaining, contrary to the hormones that greeted a teenager and were stubborn to leave, and she also asked nothing. Simone, Maggie mandated, was to be persona non grata. To hell with And’s assertions, fervent and pleading though they had been, that the coffee house had been circumstantial, his chat with her a mere obligation, the kiss a light thing, a gesture, circumstantial, nothing he even thought about. To hell with that.

The other girls, three, and the boys, two, had funneled wine into Hi-C grape drink bottles. The cooler was red and white and was carried by the two boys, one on each end, to the spot where they all decided to spread their towels. They had no umbrella. Because the teachers, on this Friday, had a something-or-other that no one could remember the name of and the seniors were thus free for the afternoon to amble in any direction they chose, not one of them felt the guilt they might have if they had been ditching classes. Their smiles were open and abundant. They took pulls on the Hi-C’s whenever they came running back to their spot from tossing their beach ball or letting the waves challenge their legs. It was one of those times, those rare times, when life was compliant.

Carolyn, a hundred yards out, took a moment to watch the others on the shore. They did not take to the waves as she did: it was not an art for them. As she propelled herself further out, letting herself sink before bobbing off the sand floor (the sand her feet so loved the feel of), her eyes on the solid and genial horizon, an especially big wave (a skelper, as her father often yelled to her at the approach of such a wave, though she didn’t know if he had invented the word or not) began its muscular rise. It was far less grace, her ride, than a tumbling, her arms struggling to find again their wide and strong and natatorial arc, but instead trying to balance the flail of legs, the head turning back and forth in a spume that was white but was also violet and also dark. When her head reached the surface, she breathed more quickly and deeply than she ever had in her entire life, and she found a different kind of exhilaration, one in which there mingled doubt of finding the surface again. Of her body keeping its separation from the water, all of the water. She smiled and again propelled herself outward.

Care! Ronelle called, as if to the sea itself. Carolyn! she insisted. But she was looking at the wrong girl.

Anderson and Maggie had long ago shared the resolution that cremation was their own preference were anything to happen to them, but with their children, who were so young and invulnerable, they had discussed nothing, and so they waffled, and then decided that a casket funeral was the safe thing. Maggie wore red, not black. If she knew that anyone thought that her dress might express an anger (or more: an explosion of anger), she could not care in the least. She tried, but failed, to smother the anger she felt toward the other children who attended, those who had been at the beach, carefree, guiltless, and who now made weak attempts to dissipate into the crowd. Meanwhile, it was not possible for Anderson to feel anger: he stood and his stare was directed at the casket and it was catatonic and he did not even have the will to bring into focus the life that remained around him. A hummingbird battered the air. A gathering of common starlings strutted around three headstones a small distance away. The heads of tiny dandelions assaulted the narrow walkway. It was, all of it, useless. How could you not know that?

Well, shit then, find another job! Maggie said to Anderson, throwing her kitchen towel into a sink of dirty water; even if it was only for a single moment, she wished that the towel contained all the frustrations of her day, all the pain of her day which was not exclusive of the pain of the last few months, or, to be fair, she knew, of the pain that Anderson carried in him, too. Her voice was calmer when she said Even in another state. Across the country. We don’t have to live here forever. Do we? Anderson said nothing, but he stared at the linoleum checkerboard tiles of the kitchen floor, especially the one that had always had a corner that looked like an animal had gnawed at it for a long time, and he thought. He was thinking of his job and he was thinking of Carolyn and he was thinking of the dissolutions of the world he lived in, the ones that poetry could never hope to repair.

Walking one day, Maggie saw Simone, across the street, walking in the opposite direction. She was sure that Simone was pretending not to see her. Exactly one third of her wanted to cross the street and scream, her face red with rage, and make sure that the woman knew she was the cause of everything. Everything! One third of her wanted to make her affirm that all that And had said was true. To be calm. Rational. And one third of her wanted to go over and look up at the tall woman in a way that would let her know that she was ready to fold herself in her arms.

Anderson had not been near the shore for months. When the chair had suggested a conference at a hotel in Pacific Beach, he had begged off. As well, he had written nothing in his journal or on paper for months; he had placed no “wonderful word” on his list. The only writing he had done was the commentary he had made in the margins of each student’s paper, an enterprise he considered rote and vacuous and ultimately worth nothing. Eventually, he retrieved a few uncompleted poems from the top of his desk, and he tried to replace one “wonderful word” with another, but in each case he would stare at the substitution for a long while and decide that this enterprise, too, was worth nothing. He would place his elbow on his desk and he would crook his arm and place his forehead in his hand, making sure to cover his eyes, and he would hope that no one, no colleague, no student, not even his wife, would find him where he was and ask him what they could do for him.

I want simplicity! Maggie said, almost furiously but not quite. She was sitting on the corner of Carolyn’s bed, on her pink bedspread, and perhaps she was speaking to the room itself, which was devoid of anyone but her. I want to sit in the backyard with the sun on my face and watch my basil seeds break from the soil in their pots and reach up. I want to read in the morning mist. I want a full day of no one calling or coming to my door. I want to sleep through one goddamn night.

There was not much more in the details that were handed to Maggie than those that appeared in the newspaper: that it was a Wednesday that he disappeared; that evidence already defined his presence there, witnesses telling authorities it was early evening, that, yes, they had seen him, that he’d simply removed his clothes (the white button-down shirt and brown bow tie he always wore to class, his grey slacks), stacked them neatly, and, with no hesitation, strode his way out to answer the waves, the deeper, longer ones, the ones that silently signal to the shore their readiness to break, finally to complete their end of the roaring cycle; only one witness saying that he swam beyond the deeper ones, out, out, and it looked like he turned his head from one side to another, like he’d lost the horizon, the shore, the way out; that the local lifeguards and the Coast Guard had fastidiously done their work far past what was called for, and that in the days that went by, the family experienced an anguish that defies naming; and that a week after his disappearance it was declared that his body would never be found, that he was for all intents and purposes to be considered deceased, but that there was no way to know whether this bit of awfulness was an accident (an act of God that those not attuned to His Plan might call vile) or perhaps a drowning that the mind in that body fully intended, anguish though it may fully contain, a crime nonetheless, an unapproachable act, who could know for sure.

Yet Maggie did know. And, her love, her mate, had done nothing with the intent of asking that soul to detach itself from its body. Maggie was sure of this. Sure of it to her very core. Her son did not shed a single tear, and this bothered her, more than she would ever let on. He was sad, she was sure of that to her core as well. She watched him. By the time he entered high school the next year, his hair was long and entangled, his jeans had holes, his T-shirts were perpetually dirty, and he would walk toward the school without emotion or design or even any sense that he could survive this day, and Maggie said nothing, for she knew that this was his grief.

After she had coalesced the papers she found on And’s desk, after she’d used one of the boxes the chair had brought her (Thanks, shithead, she told him) to bring them home, she began pulling them apart again to try to find some way to organize them. She had absolutely no conscious purpose behind this action: she simply knew it was something she had to do. There were what she wanted to call the “incomplete poems,” and then the “barely begun” poems and the “notes” that seemed to be only random thoughts that may or may not open some small light (she thought to herself) on some room or other that needed light. Most of these notes she threw away. The many form rejection letters she stacked a fair distance away: later, she would take those out to the backyard to burn: an act she looked forward to.

In spite of her husband’s untidy nature, his saving grace had been that he had dated nearly everything he wrote; even each “wonderful word” was dated. This was a way, Maggie said to herself, that she could organize the pieces within the categories she had created. It took her most of a day. Throughout that day, she had been reading a little something in one span of moments, a little in another, but now she finally felt she had the luxury to sit down and read whole poems. She read too many she didn’t hope to truly understand. Reading the one on top of the “incompletes,” she saw that the date on it was just a few days before And had dissolved into the waves. With this fact, this proximity, she suffered a deep breath, one she felt all the way into her stomach and below. She read the poem again and this time paid more attention to what he’d written at the end: More, he’d written, need more here, and she felt—another deep breath—she did understand this one, that this one was real, and it didn’t matter that he hadn’t found the words to end it because it was more relevant to Carolyn and to Christian and to her than any other he’d written.

It was long ago and—since Christian found his post-grad path leading him to New York and beyond—it was far away. Nevertheless, he remembers everything. He remembers the pall over him that would not allow for tears. Until one day with his therapist, also somewhat long ago, when everything both collapsed and rose up and he cried for what seemed hours, his head in the therapist’s lap. He remembers the print of a brown and naked tree above the therapist’s desk. He pulls the yellowed paper from the box his mother left him and fingers the paper’s edges as if it were an artifact with the potential to fall apart under his touch. What’s that? his son wants to know. One of my father’s poems, he tells the boy. What he is not sharing is the contents of the small white note attached to the page, which addresses him and which tells him two things: that the poem is to be shared with no one but himself and his loved ones and that it is the last poem his father wrote. This and the other boxes in the room, he laments to himself, are the contents of his mother’s life and thus the contents of his father’s life that came to her after his death. His wife and daughter have left their exploration of those other boxes to join his son at his elbow. They gaze upon the paper; they too must be regarding it as an artifact.

My father’s last poem, he tells his wife, almost whispering. What he is not sharing is that, yes, it is almost entirely his father’s, all the lines written in blue ink, in his father’s handwriting, except for the last line, which is written in green ink and is written over a band of Wite-out; that line is in his mother’s handwriting. Do you want to hear it? he asks his children, his son and his daughter. Yes, they say, their voices neither uninterested nor excited. His wife, he notices, has already begun to read to herself.

… but a wave isn’t a circle, is it? he begins to read. He—like his mother before him, he is sure—does not quite understand the thinking behind his father’s beginning the poem as he had, apparently in mid-sentence. Maybe it was a literary thing, some way to let you know that the narrator’s soul was in such a state of disrepair there was simply no choice but for one thought to plunge into the next. Or maybe it was only some affectation of his father’s. Glancing at the lines ahead and knowing from his mother about his father’s “Wonderful Words” and believing that some of these words must be those, he will try to use his voice to lend them the elegance of delivery that they deserve. He begins again, his voice in its best timbre.

… but a wave isn’t a circle, is it? Christian reads.
more of a coil in an armature—isn’t it? —
one wave inventing the next, and
irremeable though we may think it sometimes, the water
always gathers itself again, that precise involution, throws itself again
into yet another attempt at a circle, and though we know it
for a fact, the impossibility, the water is still perfect in its
lambent incompletion.

I remember once
when a wave carried me so thoroughly, tossed me to register so much
pleasure down below the skin, down below the breast plate,
down low in the mercurial blood of the heart, which, we must
know and remember, is its own blood, that I delighted
not only in the joy I took in but
in the breaths I gave up.

This is what his father had written, and then he, Christian, reads, with no intention of a pause, with no desire for his voice to break, what his mother wrote:

There is so much I want to tell my family.

Jim Waters' story is a curious one. After he earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University in 1986, life in its capriciousness (twists and turns, wounds and healing, the sublime and the ridiculous) saw fit to take him away from writing creatively, and now, in his 69th year, he has returned to this love. He is working on a novel and a collection of short stories, of which “The Invention of Waves” is one. It is his first published story. He lives in Chandler, Arizona, with his wife. They have three grown daughters.

His Instagram handle is writerjimwaters.