The ideas for my most recent books, Ships That Cross in the Night and In My Life came from memory as much as imagination. Both novels draw from the emotional landscape of my adolescence in Bismarck, North Dakota, and from the kind of Midwestern years that feel almost impossible to explain now because the world was so much quieter then.
When I was young, there were no cell phones following us everywhere, no selfies, no social media proof of where we had been or who we had loved. Video games were still rudimentary, something played in arcades, rec rooms, or basements, not entire worlds we disappeared into. Deliveries meant the newspaper, pizza, and the milkman. Life had more gaps in it then, more silence, more waiting, more chances for a night to become legendary simply because no one documented it.
A lot of my imagination returns to the Missouri River bottoms, especially a place we called “The Desert.” It was where friends went dirt biking, where bonfires burned after dark, where parties gathered at the edge of the cottonwoods and the river seemed to hold every secret we were too young to understand. Those places had a wildness to them: dust, river mud, headlights, music, laughter, longing, and the sense that one summer could shape an entire life.
Ships That Cross in the Night and In My Life both grew from that feeling—the way people drift in and out of one another’s lives, the way first loves and old friendships leave marks, and the way the past keeps crossing the present long after we think we have outgrown it. I wanted to write about characters who carry those years with them, not as nostalgia alone, but as evidence of who they once were and who they might still become.
When I was young, there were no cell phones following us everywhere, no selfies, no social media proof of where we had been or who we had loved. Video games were still rudimentary, something played in arcades, rec rooms, or basements, not entire worlds we disappeared into. Deliveries meant the newspaper, pizza, and the milkman. Life had more gaps in it then, more silence, more waiting, more chances for a night to become legendary simply because no one documented it.
A lot of my imagination returns to the Missouri River bottoms, especially a place we called “The Desert.” It was where friends went dirt biking, where bonfires burned after dark, where parties gathered at the edge of the cottonwoods and the river seemed to hold every secret we were too young to understand. Those places had a wildness to them: dust, river mud, headlights, music, laughter, longing, and the sense that one summer could shape an entire life.
Ships That Cross in the Night and In My Life both grew from that feeling—the way people drift in and out of one another’s lives, the way first loves and old friendships leave marks, and the way the past keeps crossing the present long after we think we have outgrown it. I wanted to write about characters who carry those years with them, not as nostalgia alone, but as evidence of who they once were and who they might still become.