Writer Jeremy Broyles chats with me today about his new work of literary fiction, Flat Water.
Bio:
Jeremy Broyles is an Arizona native, originally from the Cottonwood-Jerome-Sedona high desert. He earned his B.A. from Doane College, now University, his M.A. from Northern Arizona University, and his MFA in fiction from Wichita State University. He is a professor with nearly twenty years of experience teaching in higher education, and he currently serves as the creative writing program director at Mesa Community College where he has taught since 2017. His stories have appeared in The MacGuffin, Santa Clara Review, Rock and a Hard Place Magazine, Pigeon Review, Pembroke Magazine, Red Rock Review, BULL, Suburbia Journal, and Reckon Review amongst many others. His novella, What Becomes of Ours, was published in 2014 by ELJ Publications. His novel Flat Water–the story of siblings, surfing, and sharks and what happens when those things come together both in and out of the water–was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2023. He is an aging rider of bicycles, a talentless surfer of waves, and a happily mediocre player of guitars.
Welcome Jeremy. Please tell us about your current release.
Flat Water is the story of Monty Marinnis and his return to the California coast after many years away. When he was fifteen, he watched as his beloved older brother, Max, died after a freak encounter with a shark. This tragedy was enough to chase Monty out of the ocean and for him to leave behind his greatest love—surfing. The Marinnis family quickly imploded after Max’s death, and Monty ran away to the middle of the country where he vowed to stay for good. Years later, however, he is pulled back when his younger sister calls him home for her wedding. After all this time away, Monty is unprepared to face the trauma he was convinced he had left behind buried in the sand. As he and his wife, Charlotte, return to his hometown of Flat Water, Monty is forced to reckon with an ugly, dangerous truth. His grief—and the sharks—have been waiting for him. If he is to find redemption, it will be here on the Pacific Ocean—if it doesn’t swallow him whole first.
What inspired you to write this book?
I realize how this is going to sound given I wrote a book about surfing and sharks, but I set out to write a love song to the state of Nebraska. The title, in fact, speaks to this. Nebraska is taken from an Otoe word translating to—you guessed it—flat water. But I’d had enough of Nebraska stories with fields and blizzards and schooners. I wanted to see if I could write a Nebraska story with oceans and beaches. I have no idea if I pulled it off, but that was certainly where this story first germinated. From there, I set out to find a way to connect these disparate physical places—the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast. I wanted that vehicle to be a character who was fundamentally flawed and, therefore, recognizable to us all. That’s how I settled on the concept of grief as a central theme. Grief is universally human while being entirely individualistic. That became what I used to bridge not only the geography of the story but also the emotional journey Monty takes in tortured, oftentimes self-destructive steps after he loses his older brother.
Excerpt from Flat Water:
The sunny, salted air swirls while sets of waves, pregnant with the energy of the tidal world, tumble to the beach where they wash out in bubbled froth. The sky above is a righteous blue mirroring the sacrosanct water below. It is July, and the top layer of sand heats to a simmering crust, but the wind sliding off from the churning Pacific tempers the day.
The surf is ideal.
Monty waits on the wave that only now is a bulging swell twitching under the surface like a flexing muscle sliding beneath oiled skin. Even at fourteen-years old, he can feel the shape of the water and what it will become. The swell builds. There comes a gentle pull of suction like a quick gasp of air before a held breath. Monty turns and paddles the board forward with four sharp strokes, and the swell—at last grown too big—catches and trips forward. Monty, with a fluid, blurring grace born of faultless instinct, stands atop his board right in the pocket of a curling, mythic wave that could make converts of the godless and heathens of the devout.
That is surfing for him. Epiphanous. Those rushing, electric moments when everything loses its grip on him, and he is the truest version of himself sliding across the ocean like a skipped stone. But it goes wrong all at once. Just as Monty tucks in and carves his weightless, winding wake through the water, a tourist with his scuffed rental board tries to catch the same wave even though it’s far too gone. Monty jumps, and, for a moment, he believes himself a spontaneous evolutionary miracle breeching from the depths to sprout functional gills on his neckline and a distinct dorsal fin bursting through his wet suit on his back. Time, however, runs out, and evolution winds backwards as he, just an air-breathing mammal, plunges into the chaos of the breaking wave. Underneath, he tumbles at the whimsy of the water and washes ashore like so much flotsam spat from the sea.
Monty wipes the salt from his eyes and blows it from his nostrils as he gathers his board under his arm. He finds the tourist staggering through the shallows—his own unleashed board now beached.
“I suppose that one was my fault then, right?” Monty says to the man whose ill-fitting red trunks appear pinned in place by his swollen belly lapping over the drawstrings at the front.
“What’s that?” he asks as the remnants of a spent wave catch him at the back of the thighs and jolt him forward a step.
“Didn’t you see I was already on that wave? You didn’t, did you? You weren’t even looking.”
“Oh, sorry about that. I’m still pretty new to this.”
“Then here’s some free advice. Pay attention and stay out of the way. If you can’t handle that, you’re probably better off building sand castles with your fat kids.”
“Excuse me? Hey, I’m talking to you.”
But Monty walks away without acknowledging any of the man’s words, and the tourist with the bulging belly has his voice wiped out by the staccato screams of seagulls and the splash of the surging sea.
“That was a good wave,” Max says as Monty drops into the sand at his side. “So good, in fact, that Ohio wanted in on it too.”
“Ohio?” Monty asks.
“You know the tourist types, Monty,” his older brother says. “I can’t prove he’s from Ohio, but he just looks like he is. Don’t you think?” They share a squinting smile in the insistent July sunlight. “Speaking of which,” Max says. He lounges prone in the sand braced on bent elbows, and he gestures with a quick tick of his head toward the tourist in red trunks standing over them.
“Hey there, pal,” the man says. He still has not yet collected his board. “You were giving me some advice just now. I thought you might want to try again, but make sure I can hear you this time since I couldn’t quite make it out before.” He speaks to Monty, but Max answers.
“I didn’t hear either, but I’m guessing it had something to do with you fucking things up for everyone else.” Max tilts his head to the left and into shadow. He does not move otherwise. “Don’t take it personally. We all fuck up sometimes. I’m guessing you haven’t done much surfing in your life, but it seems like a bit of common sense would tell you that trying to catch a wave someone else is already riding is bad form. If you didn’t know that before, now you do.”
“A couple of smart asses with smart mouths,” the man says. “I’ll be damned if I came all the way out here to get lectured by a couple of teenagers.” The man’s face has bloated like his blood no longer circulates. It just collects in his trembling jowls that inflate the angrier he gets.
Max remains piously still. “Then don’t,” he says. “Walk away. It’s that simple.”
And the man does just that, huffing across the beach like the blood is in his mouth now and tasting of iron and garlic.
For a moment, the brothers share the comfort of the day without spoiling it by speaking. They are here together at Flat Water Beach, and it does not matter who sunbathes beside them or surfs out from underneath them. They have what they need in the sun, the water, and one another.
“Are we asses?” Monty asks, and his voice pops a bubble he did not realize had been around the two of them.
“Nah,” Max says. “We were just trying to help Ohio out in our own way. We’re the salty locals. That’s part of our charm.”
Monty nods. Waits. Stares out over the Pacific. “I called his kids fat.”
“Oh, yeah, then we are definitely asses.”
Max laughs and Monty joins. The surf is ideal, and Ohio is so far away as to be another planet where life somehow sorted itself out minus the help of an ocean.
What exciting project are you working on next?
Right now, I’m shopping my short story collection and have my fingers crossed tightly enough to constrict proper blood flow that the book will soon have a home. The short form was my first love, and I am becoming more and more convinced it is also my greatest love. With that said, however, this summer I’ll be writing a novel with the working title of The Frogmouths of Lancaster County. I want to see if I can write my version of a zombie story and still have it be compelling. This is how I choose all my writing topics—the things that I fell in love with when I was young and never successfully outgrew. So now that I have my shark book out of the way, it’s time to turn to the undead. If my career lasts long enough, I’m sure I’ll eventually get to the Loch Ness Monster and punk rock concerts. Not at the same time, of course. Then again, maybe.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I don’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t writing. I have no memories of a pre-writing version of myself. I remember writing haphazard plays during free time in second grade. Those plays, to the immeasurable credit of my saintly teacher Mrs. Caton, would then be given time in class after recess to be performed. Story is the only thing that has always mattered to me, and writing is not something I have ever picked up or put down. It has simply been a part of me for as long as I have been.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
My day job is as a creative writing professor and director of a creative writing program in Mesa, Arizona. The blessing of such a position is that I am paid to talk about stories—something I would do for free (but I’ve signed the contract, so no take-backs). The curse is that as a creative writing professor, the vast majority of your time and energy is dedicated to the stories of others. For your own work, then, you have to be able to work in dedicated chunks. Got a week off for spring break? Get a story done. Winter break between semesters? Get your collection put together. Three glorious months off for summer vacation? Write your novel.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I hope this doesn’t make me sound elitist, but here it goes. When I’m working on a story, I still like pen and paper to plot, make notes, etc. But I use only a fountain pen. It just feels so writerly to me.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
You’re looking at it! Though, the kindness of Mrs. Caton notwithstanding, I eventually figured out my writing path was not as a playwright. And thus did theater dodge a bullet.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I would say, first and foremost, thank you for reading. I tried my absolute damnedest to write the best novel I could, and I hope the time spent reading was worth the effort. And if they’d hear me out, I’d like to say that I know sharks might not be the cutest or cuddliest of Earth’s creatures, but our planet is better off when there is a vibrant, healthy population of sharks swimming the seas. No overfishing, no long lines. Save the sharks!