Mare Island

Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Photography. What would it be like to discover your very own ghost town? To stumble upon the place by accident and feel it grow more and more mysterious with every step you take? The buildings, still standing tall with their importance, abandoned, every window broken; heavy equipment in chains, rusting in plain sight; weeds taking over the premises; the feeling that everyone's just left yesterday or the day before.

It's this chance encounter with Mare Island, the first naval base the US opened on the Pacific Ocean, once the shipbuilding capital of the western world, home and workplace to over 50,000 people but shuttered by an act of Congress on April Fools' Day, 1996, that leads the writer to make up stories about what he's seeing, and to ask himself questions about his own life that he wouldn't have otherwise asked.

MARE ISLAND is part documentary in words and pictures of a place the writer calls, "the Stonehenge of the American empire," and part self-portrait, an extremely personal encounter with the past, present, and a possible future.

Established in 1854, Mare Island Naval Shipyard was the first US Navy base on the Pacific Ocean. 514 ships were built at Mare Island and thousands of other vessels overhauled in dry dock during its colorful heyday. Once considered America's military shipbuilding capital, Mare Island was registered as a California Historical Landmark in 1960, and parts of the base were declared a National Historic Landmark District in 1975.

"Bombing along the highway at the north edge of San Francisco Bay, as we moderns are wont to do, the turnoff to Mare Island passes in a blink, and most of us don't think twice.

But Brooks Roddan takes the exit—and finds himself in a sprawling, ghostly monument to the American Empire. Slow down now and walk with him on this provocative meditation on power, impermanence, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves."—Jay Harris, Former Publisher of Mother Jones

Brooks Roddan lives in San Francisco's historic Presidio district and escapes as often as he can to his cabin in Wyoming. A poet, he's written seven chapbooks and books, including The Light of the Light, (Blue Earth Press, 1987), The Frog Club (Readymade Books) and Days by Themselves (Blue Earth Press, 2006). Writing as Thomas Fuller, a pseudonym, his first novel MONSIEUR AMBIVALENCE (IF SF Publishing, 2013) received an Award in the Fiction Category at the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. MARE ISLAND is his first book of non-fiction.