Jeffery W. McKelroy

You are a writer the moment that you say you are a writer. Then you must prove it. I went to school for 7 months to become an electronics technician but couldn’t call myself one until I graduated and had the certificate in my hand. I spent four years studying law but I never went on to get my doctorate and so I am not a lawyer. Unfortunately, in my 20’s I decided to call myself a writer and from then on, I have been on a journey to prove it. I didn’t write while I was in the Army because when you are in the Army it is your life. I left the Army for this reason. I joined the Coast Guard, and it reignited my desire to create art. For me, the Coast Guard was one long Tom Waits song. It was 20 years of loss, loneliness and longing…..but I loved it. In the Coast Guard I wandered the streets of Old San Juan; I sailed into the Bermuda Triangle; I drank enough to drown in Trinidad. Now, home, I suppose, I am free to write it all down.

When you come home, it is not what you think it will be. It is quiet. It is lonely. There is no more the sound of the ship’s engines humming. There is no more the smell of the Jack of the Dust preparing the morning meal. There is no more the pipes over the 1MC. It is just me and my thoughts and the nightly dreams of a ship underway, and the sea, the endless sea. And so I must write.

Writing. As Bukowski said, “Don’t do it, but if you must, go all the way.”