Former philosophy professor George Kent Kedl gave up his 20-year teaching career for life on a sailboat with his wife and children. His award-winning release We Ran Away to Sea: A Memoir and Letters (2023) was written with a combination of his late wife Pamela Thompson Kedl’s letters and his own memories of their adventures. Look for Kent on his website JacanaPress.com, on Facebook and on Tiktok. We Ran Away to Sea is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.

At its heart, what is your memoir about?
It is the story of my mid-life crisis, roughly spanning from 1984 to 2000, when I was obsessed with creating a life of cruising the world on a sailboat. First, with my wife Pam and our two young sons, and later with my wife alone. I attempted to escape the American way of life, which I had come to see as materialistic and shallow. I was influenced by Thoreau’s admonition to “Simplify, simplify, simplify” and Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, a book that confirmed my thinking about how wasteful and unsustainable our lives in the United States were. Although neither one of us knew anything about sailing or the sea (we had both grown up in Wyoming and were living in South Dakota), a sailboat looked like a perfect solution. We could travel anywhere in the world for free with the wind to blow us about. We wouldn’t be wasting valuable resources. The boat would serve as both a home and a means of travel, and we could sustain ourselves from the sea. If we ran out of money, we would get work wherever we were. My previous experience of living and working in Colombia as a Peace Corps volunteer convinced me that working in foreign countries was the best way to learn to appreciate the ways of other people. Pam, the co-author of the book, did not share precisely the same ideas about what we were doing, so my attempt to create a new life ultimately failed. One reviewer calls the book a love story, and it is. We weathered our differences and stayed together because we loved each other.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
I wanted to preserve some of Pam’s writing, primarily her letters to friends and relatives, which reported on our locations and discoveries at various stops, as well as her often witty observations and reflections on our experiences. Finding a way to combine my stories and Pam’s in a way that avoided needless and boring repetition while maintaining the tension of our different perceptions was challenging. I wanted the book to be more than an outdated travelogue. Our excellent developmental editor, Jacquelin Cangro, played a crucial role in guiding us through this process. Reviewers say the book flows smoothly from one voice to the other, so I think we succeeded.

When did you know you wanted to write your memoir? What prompted the push to begin the project?
The simple, one-word answer is: Linnea, my second wife, whom I met after Pam’s death. During the COVID pandemic, I came across a batch of Pam’s letters and thought they were clever and amusing, and ought to be preserved for our sons. When I showed them to Linnea, she said, “Oh, no, they are too good for that. These should be made into a book!” Over the years, I had written for my amusement and to get things down while I could still remember them. I had many stories about our years on the boats. So, we had lots of material to draw from—indeed, way too much. We had to cut a lot to keep the book in bounds. The memoir was our COVID project. I wrote, and Linnea edited (both Pam’s letters and my stories), and made me keep my nose to the grindstone. (Note from Linnea: At first, I was hesitant to edit Pam’s letters. As a historian, I felt they should be preserved as written. But with advice from other readers and thinking about it more deeply, I realized that if I had written those letters, they would not have been intended for publication. Often writing on a rocking boat, I would have eventually edited them for publication, and would want someone else to do so if I couldn’t. So, I became bolder in my editing, always keeping in mind what Pam intended. I also cut passages that impeded the flow of the story.)

How is the book structured and why did you choose to put it together that way?
The book is divided into three parts. The first part tells the story of our first boat with the boys. It includes why we gave up our rather conventional life in the States, the search for a boat that took us to England, finding the boat, the almost immediate desertion of mate and crew, the stormy first sail to the Canary Islands, the reuniting of the family, the sail across the Atlantic, the cruise through the Caribbean and eventual sale of the boat in Florida.

The second short, transitional part is about the years getting the boys through school and settled enough for Pam and me to take off on a second boat. It was a time of growing desperation. We escaped to China for a semester and also searched for and found another boat.

The third and longest part is about our escape to the Caribbean on our second boat. We had more adventures as we traveled throughout the Caribbean, and South and Central America. The growing tension leads to our return to the States, where we reestablish ourselves, at least temporarily, and eventually sell the boat. That is the end of the dream and the book.

Tell us how the book came together.
The whole process took about two and a half years. Aside from Linnea’s editing as we went along, we hired a developmental editor who was most helpful and led to more rewriting. We hired a local graphic artist who came up with several cover designs that were rather generic-looking and did not effectively convey the nature of the book. Then, on the advice of a writer friend, we hired Sara de Haan, a book designer, to format the book, design the cover, and add the maps based on my drawings and copies from Google Maps. A rather subtle feature of the structure is how we, at Sara’s suggestion, distinguished between our two voices by changing the margins.

Sara outsourced the maps, which required several edits (delaying the publication for months). The maps also needed minor adjustments to conform to Amazon’s printing specifications. She patiently came up with a variety of designs for the cover. We liked the first design better than most of the later ones. In the end, we narrowed our choices down to the first cover and the last one and took a survey of preferences (in our Christmas letter) and among friends and colleagues. In the end, we chose the final, less popular one, partly because it was based upon a piece of Pam’s artwork that conveyed the essence of the book in one picture.  We could reissue the book with the other cover and see if it sells more copies, but it has done quite well with the chosen cover, and we haven’t grown tired of looking at it. We also had it printed on a mug, a tote bag, a poster for book signings and readings, and selected an image from the cover for bookmarks.

The rewriting and re-editing seemed endless, but the book turned out to be much better for it. One of the more difficult tasks was cutting out stories simply because they would make the book too long. We naively thought Sara was formatting the book to be published on Amazon as a printed book and an eBook. That turned out not to be the case. She thought we should go through IngramSpark and let Amazon handle the rest. The research we did indicated we would do better to upload the book directly to Amazon ourselves. Which we were able to do because we purchased our own ISBNs. However, formatting the book for Kindle or any other eBook format would require more work. It looked like it was going to be an expensive proposition. Still, another writer friend recommended a book designer in the Netherlands who did it promptly and well for a fraction of the other bids we’d received. She also spotted a few errors that we were able to fix.

Is there a chapter or scene in your memoir that you’d love to see play out in a movie?
One of my favorite chapters that captures what cruising in a small sailboat allows one to do (that would be impossible through other means) is a trip we made up the Macareo River in Venezuela—one of the rivers that forms the delta of the Orinoco. We visited a Warao Indian dwelling, experienced the hectic and chaotic begging in a small village we anchored near, and had a sleepless night, desperately protecting the anchored boat from flotsam coming down the river. Best of all, we squeezed the boat up a small side stream into the uninhabited jungle to a spot wide enough to turn and anchor the boat in the heart of the jungle. We were miles from any other human being, and as alone with the natural world as it is possible to be with our little home with us. We sat in the cockpit, binoculars in hand, quietly reading and whispering to each other for fear of breaking the spell. For several days, we observed the wild birds and animals (Macaws, Toucans, Scarlet Ibises, Hoatzins, howler monkeys, and Spider Monkeys). We experienced awe that we never forgot.

What was the most rewarding aspect of writing We Ran Away to Sea?
Reflecting on our boating years, twenty years or more ago, reviewing the old logbooks, and especially rereading Pam’s letters, gave me a perspective on our lives that made me much more aware of what was happening than I realized at the time. If Pam were alive today, I would want to apologize to her for my lack of awareness about many things and to thank her for her patience and strength in accompanying me all those years. Writing this book forced me to think harder about what we did and made me recapture the past in a way that I could not have done in any other way.

What makes the book unique in the memoir market?
I don’t know of any other small-boat-sailing memoir in which a family sets out across an ocean with such a lack of experience with either boats or the sea as we had. There are other memoirs of boaters setting out with little knowledge, such as The Sail of Two Idiots, but they didn’t try to cross an ocean for their first sail—and their marriage broke up in the process, while Pam and I remained devoted to each other until the day she died. The two voices create tension because each author has different ideas about what they are doing and what is worth telling about. Reviewers have said that they expected the book to be a ‘we-went-here-we-went-there’ sort of book (as most boating memoirs are), but found it contained an unexpected human-interest aspect as well.

What writing projects are you working on now?
We cut several stories from We Ran Away to Sea. They make enough material for another, somewhat shorter book. I am working on a second book that includes them.

KL Wagoner loves creating worlds of fantasy and science fiction. Her current work in progress is The Last Bonekeeper fantasy trilogy and short stories in the same universe. A member of SouthWest Writers since 2006, Kat has worked as the organization’s secretary, newsletter editor, website manager, and author interview coordinator. Kat is also a veteran, a martial art student, and a grandmother. Visit her at klwagoner.com.