Without
patience, a sailor I would never be—Lee Allred
Bestselling
novelist David Poyer speaks with a patient tongue, and with a
shipwright’s steady and sure hand molds from words a vessel. And
like a master shipwright’s work, Poyer’s naval thrillers are
composed out of airy will as if they were the finest oak, the most
durable cypress. Poyer novels are carefully wrought from research
and experience.
A
frame built with patience and deliberate and meticulous strikes.
“I
like to do the research, not just the archives, but museums. Museums
preserve the objects the people interacted with. Your job as a writer
is to recreate the experiences.”
To
tell the best story you can.
His
voice is calm, patient, and rings with dedication. A sense of duty.
No longer to the Navy but to the story, the alluvial flow of words
that is the work of a novelist.
Over
the course of his career, Poyer’s novels have touched upon
contemporary hot topics such as environmentalism, biggotry,
terrorism, political assassination and dozens of other geo-political
puzzle cubes. His characters are forced to make the right decision in
the face of difficult circumstances. A hot box decision. A trigger
moment. Down to a Sunless Sea dealt with a corrupt nature
conservancy who wished to hoard water reserves, The Passage
dealt with gays in the military. Moral soups indeed, for the
protagonists must decide, “what is the authentic authority?”
What, in the name of all that is holy, is the right thing to do?
A
duty Poyer’s been charged with before.
While
in the Navy Poyer faced danger and adversity, and worked on billets
as varied as writing the Expeditionary Forces Conducting
Humanitarian Assistance Missions manual, still in use today, to
the job of Senior Policy Advisor to the Deputy Chief of Staff, US
Joint Forces Command. To say nothing of his Naval Academy days
(skewered in the academy classic The Return of Philo T. McGiffin).
Rear Admiral Martin Janczak called him “intellectually
aggressive1,”
a trait that could be applied to many of his characters including Dan
Lenson, the hero of Poyer’s newest, The Crisis. Set in
Ashaara, Africa in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, Lensen is
forced to juggle the politics of aid relief with the dangers of the
environment and young warlord eager for blood. “Lensen is my
attempt to portray the good man acting in the world.”
Poyer’s
characters have to decide what is right in a tough situation, a
decision that may not be a moral decision, but one necessary for the
conflict at hand. A decision tempered by training, by mental
exercise, by will. The rigorous mental training of an officer. “Moral
responsibility is one of the things I return to again and again.”
And
so do his characters.
This
time, helping Lensen figure the crisis out is Teddy Oberg, the Navy
sniper, and Aisha ar-Rahim a Black Muslim female NCIS agent, who
originally appeared in The Command, who brings her unique
perspective to Crisis. “As Lensen rises as a senior
he gets removed from action,” which necessitates
Teddy and Aisha. “They work in more operative plain than Lensen.”
It
makes for a good heady mix of adventure, duty, and intrigue.
My
inner Eastern Shore nerd thinks its cool that its brewed up here, on
Church Creek, just miles from where I played war and Star Wars and
waffle ball. The view from Poyer’s back porch is pure Eastern
Shore Beauty, the creek and its gears tumbling beyond the yard. The
wind stirs and a heron pays us no mind, and eventually breaks into
flight.
Poyer,
like Lensen, I think, is a good man acting in the world. He and his
wife, novelist and poet Lenore Hart, raise money for the Eastern
Shore Public Library, and he ribs me for not having seen the new
facility. And it makes perfect sense. I wasn’t sure what to expect
from him, but when he quoted Heidegger and discussed Dickens,
Tolstoy, and Faulkner I was reminded of that great Life photo of VMI
cadets reading Howl. It was a mental head smack. Naval Academy
students are afforded a real liberal arts education, in the old
school sense. Know your classics. Know your history. Participate in
the world of ideas; physical training notwithstanding. But no longer
is his ship stamped by the Navy, it’s stamped by a librarian.
His
house, like the library, is stuffed full of books, some threatening
to flow out of their baskets as if the very passion contained within
could no longer stand to be frozen. There’s no TV, only a
stillness. The sound of minds working. The solitude has benefited his
daughter, Naia, a senior at Broadwater Academy. “
has given her an attention span,” he said of his daughter,
“something she doesn’t see in her peers.”
Poyer’s
comfortable at home, on the shore, in the middle of writing, or at
the beginning of it, his mind poised for the long work of spinning
words onto the screen. Just try writing 2000 words a day. It’s
exhausting.
And
he’s done it over the lifespan of 30 books.
But
that’s what it takes to keep up with the pace of a best selling
thriller writer. 2000 words a day. That’s before revisions.
Before
he teaches.
For
like a shipwright who begins to take in apprentices as his craft
grows long, Poyer, like his wife, Hart, teaches his students to face
the blank page; the writer’s equivalent to the frame of a ship.
Poyer and Hart are professors at the Creative Writing program at
Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre. Save for a few weeks a year where
the couple are visiting professors, Poyer and Hart teach via the web.
“That’s
what we do here,” Poyer says, speaking of his virtual workshops.
Students send him drafts and he teaches them to analyze characters
and to do matrices of them, and teaches them to build outlines.
“Plan
it rigorously. Be open to changes.” Poyer favors a detailed
outline. One that can work on “a microgram of inspiration.
“It’s
terrifying to face the emptiness of the screen.” He’s speaking
again of his students, and of the work. Always the work, which he
compared to engineering which “proceeds by a series of unsatisfying
compromises” before a work is complete.
Poyer’s
no dry academic. He’s not a professor who is a careerist. He’s a
novelist who is a teacher. He’s a craftsman who takes on
apprentices. And he, like the burly romantics, likes to wield the
world like he wields the word. He tells his students to get out and
experience the world and, like the Romantics, be attuned to nature.
“If you are observant the sensory clues are there
in way you can’t get from the archives.” For one of his students
Poyer charged not only a reading list, but activities as well. “Spend
a week touring with a forest ranger, go horseback riding. The problem
with young writers is if they don’t know something they fall back
on what they see on TV. I’d advise them to go out and do it.”
Something
Poyer practices. For his Civil War on the Sea series, Poyer
sailed up the James to Richmond, retracing the Yankee naval route to
Drewry’s Bluff. Poyer’s sailed to Jacksonville and up to Boston
Harbor. He single handedly commands Frankly Scarlett, his 28.5
sloop rig, one of the reasons he and his wife moved to the Eastern
Shore in 1991. “I had lived in Norfolk, and knew the shore. I
wanted a place to keep a sail boat. Lenore likes a countrified life.”
They
live outside Franktown, the hamlet of my youth. Franktown hasn’t
changed too much. There’s more people living on the creek than
there were in the late 70s. There’s a new post office, and the
trees behind Town Hall, no bigger than a shed, a small shed, have all
been cut down. Franktown is quiet, with a few houses as old as any in
the country, and small tucked away groves and backyards that border
the soy fields which stretch on and on to the woods.
Ker
Claiborne, the protagonist of the Civil War on the Sea series
is from the Eastern Shore, and the sailing the shore offers Poyer is
a sure and steady teacher for a man who values duty, a sharp mind,
attention to detail. Though he doesn’t care for fishing, “Don’t
have the patience for it,” he says, he has the mind for sailing.
For wind. For the sunny brightness of a summer afternoon.
His
voice is confident, sure, and his eye looks over his domain as if he
were on the deck of tall ship, his mind and senses broad and wide as
the very sea, looking, noticing, and witnessing the invisible gears
of the world turn. I imagine he is thinking about his quota, his
work. I imagine he is thinking about the cut of the wind, the hard
creak of a sailboat.
Then
again, as he reminds me, one shouldn’t question the methods of
another artist. It just is. Like it sounds.
The
pollen blows off the large pine tree in his backyard, like smoke, and
the crowns of cones that smoke and blow remind me of so many little
pipes, all puffing at once, like a clutch of gnomes. Poyer’s picked
it up, not me, I’m trying to keep up with the man whose demeanor
suggest patience, an owl mind.
We
discuss his characters, the state of American poetry. The Navy. And
again Poyer resets the conversation back to nature. Back to the still
and busy environment that is the Eastern Shore coastline.
And
if environment shapes consciousness, then Poyer’s books reflect, at
the very least, his life’s work, shaped by his childhood in
Pennsylvania, by the sea when it boils, by the tough chafe of people
who act in the face of death, by the steep perch of a hard rolling
deck “It’s all in there,” he says. He looks to me and to the
copy of The Crisis, so minty fresh it begs to be touched,
“It’s all in there. It’s in the work.”
1
RADM Martin Janczak, USNR Remarks - Dave Poyer Retirement Ceremony 9
JUNE 2001
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