Long before I knew Noel Short, my collaborator and muse, long before I knew most of the people I know today, before I ever even entertained a notion of what I would do after college, I was sitting in a stark, fluorescent-lit classroom at Eastern Illinois University staring at a blank sheet of paper. Now, this was truly in the dinosaur days when nobody carried a laptop to class and almost no one I knew even had a cell phone. I certainly didn't, and my computer was a bulky, pieced-together junkyard troll of a thing squatting atop my desk back in my dorm room. So it was a piece of paper I was staring at and not the white glare of a computer monitor.
The class was Creative Writing and the assignment was an in-class exercise. This wasn't a project to take back the dorms and promptly forget about in favor of beer and video games until 4 hours before it was due, at which point a mad scramble would ensue, and enough creative juices would flow to squeeze something passable out in time to avoid a failing grade – no, this had to be conjured out of thin air, like, right now.
The paper lay untouched on the table, one corner fluttering intermittently in the light current of air that drifted down from the ceiling vents. With no ideas forthcoming, I reached for my pen anyway—maybe to twirl it absently between my fingers as a thinking aid. I picked it up, and like a breaker (haha) tripped to complete a circuit, an image leapt into my head – a scene actually: A desperate merman darting and twisting through lush underwater terrain, pursued relentlessly by a dark, reptilian sea creature.
And there ya go.
I can’t say where that image came from, only that it ended up in my mind when I picked up the pen. I’ve always been a rabid sci-fi and fantasy reader, ever since I graduated from Curious George and Bill Peet books, but I didn’t coax this idea into existence from some external inspiration. No, I am convinced that this scene was already happening, off in some ether where ideas are incubated, that ‘Breakers’ is a drama that was already being played out -- perhaps always has been – and became known to me at the precise moment of its greatest need for expression. I think maybe that merman, Gundred, was being chased by that sea-creature countless millennia before any of our ancestors ever walked the earth, for eons searching in panic for a place of refuge, and I think he found me.
