Cloudbreak, California - Softcover

Daniels, Kelly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0983476454 ISBN 13: 9780983476450

Publisher: Owl Canyon Press, 2013

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. One day during his ninth-grade Speech class Kelly Daniels's outlaw, soul-surfer father appears at school unannounced and pulls the boy from class. Speeding down the freeway, Daniels's father admits that he has been involved in a crime, but he does not remember how it happened. He'd been up for days on cocaine and booze, he explains, and the next thing he knew he woke up in jail with a bad feeling. It was almost a relief when the guard told him he'd killed his cousin Barkley, a drug kingpin of sorts. "I'm sorry to lay this on you," he tells the stunned boy, "but I'm not going to be around to watch your back. Barkley has a son your age...and this kid might come after you someday. You're going to have to learn to look after yourself." A few days later, the father skips bail and flees the country. "Forget about him," everybody says. But the boy doesn't forget. Someday, he believes, they'll find each other, the fugitive father and the dreamy son, and together they'll surf perfect, faraway waves.

"Daniels more or less raised himself, as the son of Christian cultists fallen on hard times in the California desert in the 1970s.... [H]e writes about those years of poverty and lost wandering with a nuanced objectivity that is wise as only very good writers can be wise: He draws beauty out of humiliation and fear with the precision and evocative power of his language and the relentlessness of his gaze."—Jaimy Gordon

"In [his work] you'll encounter a writer of dynamic prose, of expertly modulated sentences, and pitch perfect, often hilarious dialogue; a writer with a haunting sense of atmosphere, and considerable narrative invention."—Stuart Dybek

About this title

About the Author

Kelly Daniels grew up on the road, living for stints with his parents in a Hawaiian commune, a waterless, powerless cabin in the desert, and in an old step-van outfitted with bunks. As an adult, he set off on his own, traveling extensively through Europe, Mexico and Central America. Along the way, he picked up odd jobs when he could find them, jobs such as production manager of a furniture factory (Guatemala), newspaper reporter (Mexico), and bartender (all over). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Cimarron Review, Third Coast, Sonora Review, South Dakota Review, Santa Clara Review, GSU Review, Orange Coast Review, Eyeshot and other journals. Among other awards, he recently won first prize in Creative Nonfiction at the San Miguel Writers' Conference. He lives with his wife and young son in Rock Island, Illinois, where he teaches creative writing at Augustana College.

Reviews

Raised by hippie-like parents, Daniels essentially had to fend for himself. The stories he tells are family tales of separation, but also reconciliation. In his picaresque memoir, he describes visiting his father, who got caught selling drugs, in prison. He recounts his travels around the world, doing odd jobs in Central America, Mexico, and Europe, describing his adventures and the people he met along the way in places as varied as Guatemala City, San Salvador, Puerto Vallarta, Argentina, San Francisco, Atlanta, and, finally, Rock Island, Illinois. The writing is loose and fluid; it is a young man’s book. In fact, for most of the memoir Daniels is a man who has no strong motivation to grow up until a confrontation with a supervisor changes his way of thinking. After his father is paroled, Daniels discovers that they share a common interest in surfing. In this rambling tale of postponed adulthood, Daniels asks, and tries to answer, the question all of us have pondered at one point or another: What am I to do with my life? --June Sawyers

Edition details

• Publisher: Owl Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0983476454
• ISBN 13: 9780983476450
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230