Summer Wood Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

An interview with Summer Wood, about her second novel, Wrecker, a story of unconventional families and the true meaning of love.

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 ...