About me — Karen L. Sullivan
It can take a whole lifetime for a childhood dream to become reality, but if the dream holds up to more mature scrutiny, it’s worth pursuing.
When I was ten years old, I decided that sailing a small boat across a big ocean was a superb idea. It’s not something you tend to confess later on to, say, your high school guidance counselor when discussing future career choices like brain surgeon, diplomat, or industrial tycoon (or, in that wretched counselor’s case, “You’ll make a good-looking secretary.”)
Nor is crossing an ocean something you do on a whim or on a two-week vacation. It was just something I remember thinking, as ten-year-old me gazed at the ocean from a Maine beach about an hour after my first long look at a real offshore sailboat: Whoa, there’s no land for 3,000 miles! I’ve got to find out what it’s like out there. On a boat like that.
In the late 1970s, women who owned and sailed boats, especially solo, were rare. I had a small wooden folk boat that I sailed mostly between Branford, Connecticut, Newport Rhode Island, and Nantucket, Massachusetts. But something kept pushing me. It’s taken decades to understand what, and why, and it’s risky telling such truths in public. Because when it comes to one’s memory, what is truth? It’s much more than a recitation of facts through the lens of experiences, fears, and needs.
Truth can be an interpretation of your experience, or merely the hard facts about what you’ve learned, or, as Annie Trevaskis says, it can be something you’ve investigated via reading or watching before experiencing it for yourself. She writes: that if a particular reality TV show “…had been something I had been able to watch as a teenager, I could have avoided a fair few of the shameful mistakes I made when I began to date.” Truth is also what you try on for size, to either accept and incorporate into yourself or reject.
Women didn’t run away to sea much in those days, but after a string of family tragedies, I did. I signed aboard a 72-foot ketch as crew, and we sailed across the Caribbean from St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, to Central America, where we spent eight more months. From the captain, a retired Navy commander, I learned celestial navigation and proper watchkeeping.
The following year, I studied hard, sat the Coast Guard exam for my captain’s license, and passed. With a 100-ton license, I became one of the first woman ship captains in New England. There was quite a lot of resistance to such authority, some of it made jokingly, some seriously, but most of it turned out okay with a little humor and patience.
An Atlantic crossing in a 55' wooden schooner in 1987 had to be aborted 250 miles off Charleston, South Carolina because of a sudden structural leak that threatened to sink us in a 50-knot gale, without round-the-clock pumping. When we returned to the dock, friends were astonished to see the paint completely stripped off the lower part of the hull, so dangerously fast had we been sailing and surfing down steep Gulf Stream waves — even under bare poles.
So, while I had crossed the Caribbean, sailed to Bermuda, and up and down the US east coast several times, and much later, sailed from Seattle to Alaska’s Prince William Sound and back, I still hadn’t crossed a major ocean. I did know, however, what it’s like to be out in a wild sea in the middle of the night, in the middle of a gale.
I’m on my tenth revision of a memoir that will probably not be published until after my novel is published because memoirs are so ubiquitous these days that they’re a hard sell for a first book. It’s about why a young woman would want to go to sea, to cross an ocean in a small boat, and what she was running from. It explores the paradox of how a woman can be assertive at her job yet so easily pushed around in romantic relationships; these themes are braided into chapters that describe the turbulent emotional and physical voyages I made in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and up to Alaska. It doesn’t cover the Pacific crossing in 2011–2013, though — that will be a future book.
My novel, on the other hand, is about the generational effects of war, told in three lives lived at different times: a World War II soldier in North Africa, an art student in Paris in 1972, and a book thief in New York in 2020. Their lives intertwine like a triple helix upon discovery at a flea market of the soldier’s secret diary written in the margins of the novel Steppenwolf. The research that went into getting wartime details right has taken me over two years. I’m aiming to finish the novel this winter, then have it professionally edited, and then begin the search for another literary agent (the mine closed her business during the pandemic.)
I’ll keep you posted on the progress toward publication. Meanwhile, I love to write short pieces on other topics ranging from the environment to the satire and humor I write here on Medium. You can read other works from links on my published work page. Thanks for reading, and especially, for following and subscribing.
And special thanks to the wonderfully supportive, talented, and funny community of Medium writers I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with: Patrick Eades, Ann James, Natalie, Debra Goldyn, Laurel B. Miller, Ginger Cook, Annie Trevaskis, Carlo Zeno, Smillew Rahcuef, Mark Suroviec, Robert Bush, Terry Trueman, Bicho DoMato, Dusty Craig, Michael Burg, MD, Mike Knittel, Sally Prag, Rodrigo S-C, and Karen E. Brewer. Also to the very fun online humor magazines The Belladonna Comedy, The Haven, The Pub, Sweary Mommy, and the ever-interesting About Me Stories.
I’ll be offline from September 30, 2022, through most of October. The water beckons again.
Karen L. Sullivan writes humor in between more serious projects. Her work is published in The Belladonna, The Haven, Rainshadow Journal, Stonecoast Review, and several sailing magazines. Twitter: @karenlsullivan9.
