Joe Coomer
Joe Coomer is a fiction and nonfiction writer who lives outside of Fort Worth, Texas, and on the coast of Maine. He "spends his winters in Springtown, Texas, where he runs a pair of large antique malls. He lives in a fairly new Victorian house that he spent a year and a half building in the late eighties, a project he wrote about in Dream House [1991]. His wife, Isabelle Tokumaru, runs her paintings conservation practice in the third story, while he writes novels in the kitchen, where the food is close. Summers, they live in Stonington, Maine, an active fishing village on the coast. When the weather's nice, he takes his old motor sailer, "Yonder", on day sails and cruises down east. He chronicled her purchase, restoration, and his stupidities at sea in Sailing in a Spoonful of Water [1997]."
“How do you choose between your kids and your parents? I feel like we're all just a bunch of vikings, moving around so we can pillage and burn, make a better living. Some choose their kids, some their parents, and some both. Some people just choose themselves,”
“Are we defined by where we want to go or where we've been?”
“Could we possibly be from the place we want to be? Were we from the place we died rather than the place we were born? Are our aspirations our home? Maybe we are from that place to which we're bound, and that's why desire hurts so much, this longing to find a place to rest, to get home. We're not from the past, but the future.”
“I’ve come to the end of another book alive. At times like this I’m always at a loss for words.”
“Her whisper was, Lyman thought, like a Marlin ripping all the line out of a fishing rod.”