Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Summer Wood is the author of Arroyo. In 2007 she was awarded the Literary Gift of Freedom from A Room of Her Own Foundation for her work on Wrecker. She teaches writing for the University of New Mexico's Taos Summer Writer's Conference and in 2009 directed the first annual NEA/Taos Big Read. She is currently the director of the Young Writers' Mentorship Program and has lived in Taos for the past 20 years.
Summer Wood's website
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This book is set, mostly, in the wilds of California's Lost Coast. What made you decide to
place it there?
Well, it starts in San Francisco, actually, in a little corner of a park – Rolph Playground – that
you can still go to. I lived in San Francisco throughout my twenties and loved that city with a
kind of fury. Still do. I feel a little like a baby duck that's been imprinted with a kind of
alternate mother. And so it seemed natural to me that Wrecker would be born there, that his
birth mother would gravitate there and that – well, it was the sixties – there would be a jazz
saxophonist, and – well, you know, all that.
But it was pretty clear that the story I wanted to write, the story of an unlikely group of
misfits coming together to raise this boy, that wasn't a city story. These people were trying to
get away from civilization and its constraints. People like that, they moved to Humboldt
County. I almost did, but I was a couple of decades too late. I got to know the area pretty well,
though, because a friend had a family place up there. I'd go up every chance I got. And I was
totally enchanted. The landscape is so wild, so lush – it's a temperate rainforest, you know,
those old ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a distinguished writer in residence at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is a former staff writer at The Village Voice and Time and has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The ... (more)
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Dawn Davies has a BA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MFA from Florida International University. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Special Mention, and her work has been published in numerous journals and ... (more)
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Raising Wrecker
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