The Periods Between the Waves: An Interview with Dan Reiter about On a Rising Swell

Contributor Dan Reiter discusses his new book On a Rising Swell: Surf Stories from Florida's Space Coast. You can find his short story "Deep-Water Drift" in Shenandoah Vol. 65.1 Fall 2016.

1. You talk a lot about On a Rising Swell as belonging to the surf literature genre—how would you define this genre for outsiders? How does your book fit into it? What other writings do you feel exemplify this genre and how do they fit in?

I think that banking a whole genre around something as fatuous and hedonistic as wave riding is a pretty specious proposition. The writer (and surfer) Jay Caspian Kang once posited that “writing about surfing was impossible because surfing elicited happiness, and it is impossible to write about happiness.” Which might be why so few surf-centric books have made it into the canon of what we call literature. That said, Mark Twain and Jack London wrote some gripping descriptions of surfing back in the early twentieth century. Then there’s Gidget, the embarrassing bubble-gum archetype, which set off the surf-pop-culture boom in the late 50s.

In a recent piece at LitHub, I offer up a brief tour of the different surf lit eras. To my mind, the prime cuts have historically appeared in the surf magazines. But any discussion of the canon invariably centers around William Finnegan’s Pulitzer prize–winning memoir, Barbarian Days (2015), which took the Café Society reader into the surfing world with nuance and narrative aplomb, and cemented itself as the iconic work of the genre.

Admittedly, it’s a challenging mode to work in, especially over long stretches. The idea is to capture the essence of a simple, yet fundamentally ephemeral activity in a way that keeps the reader engaged. In On a Rising Swell, I take on the subject from oblique, varied angles, blending historical vignettes, environmental reportage, interviews, and bits of memoir, and do my best to make the experience accessible and entertaining for surfers and non-surfers alike.

2. What is the difference to you between the surf lit that comes from experienced surfers like yourself vs. that of non-surfers working in the genre? What, to you, is the most important aspect of surfing to capture in a good piece of surf lit?

Many surf narratives begin from the perspective of the beginner, or “kook.” The exhilaration of catching your first wave is certainly good fodder for descriptive verse. But a deeper, more complex understanding of the art—the obsessive, devotional lifestyle necessary to become truly proficient at surfing—requires decades of practice. Some of the most engaging themes in surf writing tend to come from those interstitial moments—the periods between the waves. Surfers spend most of their time sitting still, bobbing in the water, waiting. In surfing, just as in writing, you need to be receptive, patient, and willing to take the drop when the wave comes. If you can convey the feeling of being at a remove from land, of the coolness of the wind on your wet skin, the easy speed of a pelican’s flight, or the heft and sway of the sea beneath your board, then you’ve tapped into the essence of it.

3. What first motivated you to begin writing On a Rising Swell? What has the most surprising part of the writing process been for you ? Has researching this book changed your relationship to surfing at all?

I’ve always fashioned myself as a fiction writer, but over the past few years, in-between writing short stories, I penned some profiles of surfboard shapers and artists for surf magazines, covered paddle-out ceremonies, and conducted interviews with surfers like Kelly Slater and Caroline Marks. These dispatches, originally published in The Surfer’s Journal, Surfer, and Eastern Surf Magazine, became the first breath of On a Rising Swell. When I signed on with the University Press of Florida to put a collection together, I realized I would have to write another 30,000 words of surf-themed verse, and braid it all together in the span of eight months.

The most surprising part of the process was how much this deadline motivated me, and how productive I found I could be when I woke up before sunrise to give myself a couple uninterrupted hours at my writing desk. In terms of research, I’ll say this: there is no finer way to live than being able to justify your surfing addiction as “research.” I surfed more while writing this book than should have been allowed.

4. Do you see your identities as surfer and writer as joined in any way? As you’ve evolved in your surfing do you see corresponding changes in your writing—or vice versa—or are they discrete processes for you? If so, how do you see this manifest in On a Rising Swell?

Aristotle said “states of character arise out of like activities.” Your identity is defined by what you do with your life. Insofar as I regard myself as both a writer and a surfer, the two have become completely intertwined for me.

Part of your purpose as a writer is to set down the things you’ve learned each day, and to put them into context. In writing this book, I was able to explore the rich history of Florida’s barrier island, its Indigenous waterman tribe, which led to existential questions about sea level rise, hurricanes, and the nature of the sand beneath our feet. Surfers are the sentinels of the shore; as such, we are uniquely poised to make profound observations about the natural world. The connections I made between surfing, history, and my own life philosophy are perhaps the most important lessons to be gleaned from On a Rising Swell.

5. In other interviews you’ve spoken on your time spent studying painting prior to beginning writing. Likewise, an element of your writing broadly praised in your reviews of this book, and clearly evident in your Shenandoah piece “Deep-Water Drift,” is your evocative description and action writing. Do you think your time spent in the visual arts has influenced your writing in this respect? If so, where in On a Rising Swell do you most clearly see this influence at work?

A huge part of my evolution as an author came from those initial attempts at painting. I was twenty years old, living in Paris, and desperately trying to capture the play of light on the water, the varying hues on the face of a cathedral, or the way the sun gleamed off the leaves as they fell from the plane trees. I was obsessed with Monet, and impressionism in general… this idea that the painter’s brushstrokes could add emotional resonance to a scene. The artist, I realized, was a sort of amanuensis to the natural world, a translator of reality.

To express yourself in any art, you need to build up a facility with the medium; this requires a certain discipline, and thousands of hours of practice. I never mastered painting, but in Paris I learned to recreate that same scenic interpretation through words. And I found I could expand the scope from the visual to the other senses.

So yes, it all stemmed from that original seed of creativity that came from the visual arts, of trying to hold a mirror to the world through painting. That process was particularly useful in my descriptions of the sea or sky, or the breaking wave. Cinema also had an influence. In describing that tension that arises just before a hurricane comes ashore, I hearkened back to one of my favorite film directors: “The white noise and floating vapor gave everything the feel of a Fellini movie. Our voices sounded like other people’s voices. Somewhere out of sight, a little girl shouted ‘Daddy!’ The air had that same muffled, anticipatory susurration as in the instant just before a car crash.”

6. What passage or piece in On a Rising Swell do you think most clearly conveys the spirit of the text? Could you include it here? Why this passage specifically?

So much of surfing is about appreciation, about learning to live in the present moment and attuning yourself to the organic world. The author Andrew Furman was one of the first people to send me a note about this book, and he mentioned that he particularly enjoyed a scene in “The Birth of Style,” in which my wife and I are walking home after a surf session. I think this does a passable job of capturing that blissed-out post-surf state, and the reason we keep paddling out:

“Seek and you will find beauty in every pocket of sun and shadow. A rocket ship—a strip of fire in the north—lifting off in a pillar of alabaster smoke. A lone pelican coasts on high, dipping its wingtip, as if to acknowledge us as kindred spirits. Standing in the middle of the road one afternoon, dripping wet and awestruck, still breathing heavily from our last waves, we watch the western sky erupt in a three-dimensional filigree of pink light, a lattice of flame billowing up from the river.”

7. You began your writing career in fiction, so the turn to nonfiction seems to represent something of a pivot. Was the move to publish your first major long form work intentional or incidental? How would you compare the experiences of writing in each genre? Do you have a preference?

My first and truest love is fiction. I always go back to this Doris Lessing quote: “Fiction makes a better job of the truth.” Those impressionist or surrealist touches allow you to enhance the natural state, to illuminate the edges of reality. You build your characters and settings out of real-world amalgamations, but in fiction you can make them even more resonant.

The nonfiction mode is more rigorous in many ways. You have to adhere to actual quotes and historical facts. It’s more like documentary filmmaking. You can still carry a narrative arc, but you’re limited to a sort of photo-realistic filter. In fiction, you have more freedom to venture into the far corners of your imagination, to draw the string taut then release the tension at the ideal moment for maximum effect.

The surf writing was a sort of accidental accumulation of nonfiction. Working in this vein was edifying, in the way that restricting yourself can sometimes be beneficial in any art form. It forced me to work within a certain key, a tonal theme, and to see how far I could push the boundaries that way.

8. What do you most desire readers to take from your work, both in the case of On a Rising Swell and more broadly? Are you anticipating on working on any new projects for the future? If so, is there any thematic overlap with past projects or are you looking in a completely new direction?

Every one of the vignettes in On a Rising Swell casts light on the subculture from a different angle. Being a surf book, it can’t help but be a bit decadent. The takeaway? It’s probably something like how Twain described his autobiography: “a pleasure excursion that sidetracks itself anywhere that there is a circus.”

I definitely look forward to turning back to the fiction. First on the agenda is to finish up a few short stories I’ve been keeping on the back burner. These delve into deeper themes, of suffering, loss, passion, and bring up questions that I want to linger in the mind of the reader. Questions about the things that break us and the things that bind us together.

As of this writing, I’m about eighty pages into my first novel. If I keep to a pace of one hundred words a day (a reasonable practice that I recommend for any serious writer), it will take about two years to finish the book. In any author’s work, there can’t help but be thematic overlap. It’s an endless collage. Surfing, memory, love… all you can hope to do is sit in your chair and keep working.