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As an environmental writer for the University of Maryland Sea Grant College, Greer has written extensively in his “day job” about the Chesapeake Bay and the impact of people, agriculture, and development on the Bay's future. Hundreds of his newspaper and magazine articles have been regionally and nationally published. In his book of fiction, Greer takes a different turn by exploring people and how they resolve their conflicts with one another and with nature. Yet the setting of his short stories still remains the sea, but instead of the Chesapeake Bay, Greer's characters set out for the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean.
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A Maryland native, Greer grew up on the Chesapeake Bay and has had a lifelong relationship with sailing. “The wind first found me,” he writes in his preface, “when I was about twelve years old, on the shores of the York River, in the southern Chesapeake Bay. There my grandmother built a small cottage, where we spent every summer. I didn't really know my father's side of the family—he left when I was three—but my mother's mother gave me a place where the wind could reach me.
On summer nights, without a flashlight, I walked through soggy bottomland down to my grandmother's dock and sat dangling my legs over dark water. A night eeze often blew from the south, a soft eeze from far off. The wind came from beyond the river mouth, from beyond the Bay. It was a wind born offshore, a sea wind. It carried the sweet smells of the Atlantic, and more. It ought the eath sir of far-away lands. It whispered the promise of what rides on the wind itself.”
For an armchair sailing voyage, you'll want to pick up a copy of Greer's recently released book, available in bookstores and online.
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