I spent my childhood summers in a shingled cottage so close to the sea's edge that it was carried away by Hurricane Carol in 1954 and had to be towed back to shore by the Coast Guard. My grandfather was a professional fisherman and my most vivid memory was fishing for stripers off Nauset beach in his 22-foot wooden sea skiff, the Nike II.

After much traveling I have been able to return with my family to a year-round house overlooking Maine's Penobscot Bay and its infinite variety of maritime traffic: from the yachts and fishing craft of summer to fully laden fuel-oil tankers and the Coast Guard vessels that break a path for them through January ice.

The Wooden Nickel is my fictional tribute to those people whose whole life is boats and the sea. I began writing it the summer I was reading The Odyssey at bedtime to my 8 year old.

After he dozed off, I found myself imagining what form those classic sea dangers would take in our own time and place, what would be the current morphology of Homer's island temptresses and one-eyed giants. I tried to imagine what kind of person would be needed to seek them out and overcome them, a man who lived like Odysseus in the present moment, larger than life, bitter with experience, often to the edge of violence, plagued with bad luck and wounded with the maladies of our time.

An incident on the water that year - an intentional collision between vessels of two different social classes - provided a starting point in home waters. The flash of a face behind a fishing boat's windshield gave me my character in an instant.

So much time spent by and on the ocean has given me unending respect for, in Eliot's words, "those who are in ships, those whose business has to do with fish." They are distinguished by their everyday physical courage, their technological resourcefulness, their unlimited humor, their instinctive cognition of their environment and the uncensorable expressiveness of their language.

I tried out several more distant narrative approaches before settling on what seemed right: to get inside a working fisherman and perceive his world through his own eyes and language, the same way Lucky Lunt tries to put himself inside a lobster and experience the undersea world in crustacean form, in order to know his prey. What I saw through Lucky's eyes was an environment of which he was gradually but inevitably losing control.

The familiar relations of men, women and children were changing in incomprehensible ways. The time-honored territorial patterns of the fishing industry had blurred into inflexible bureaucracy.

The Wooden Nickel Book Review Excerpt The characters of The Wooden Nickel are painted with a fine brush and anyone who's even visited the lobster villages of eastern Maine will find familiar ground and peoples populating its pages. Although written in a voice so strong that you'll sometimes smell the bait bags, raw fish and salt spray, the story fluctuates between harsh reality and questionable fancy, especially in the reactions and decisions of the characters within. Complete Review

What we call political correctness had insidiously reshaped human speech. Globalization had reached its worldwide tentacles into the economics of his profession, resulting in frustration and rage that in a physical, present-tense man can jump quickly from violent thoughts to violent language and acts. His life had changed from the trapper to the entrapped. Even his own body was betraying him into the hands of a mysterious and infinitely expensive medical priesthood.

These challenges seemed like contemporary versions of the monsters, betrayals and seductions - often of his own creation - faced by Homer's hero on the way back to Ithaca. They are always deepened by the presence of the sea itself, which offers the same face to us now as it did in pre-literate times and will in the time to come.

In the long run, I saw Lucky Lunt as a man answerable to its trials with the equipment he has on hand: a sturdy vessel, a fit companion and a resilient heart.