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At the Waterline
At the Waterline
At the Waterline
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At the Waterline

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Effortlessly capturing the essence of life after loss and the complexity of redefining yourself, At the Waterline challenges the idealistic norms of Pacific Northwest life with a portrayal of one dockside, houseboat community's contentious history and its hard earned acceptance of unfamiliar faces.


One windy night on the Willamette River, a young man with romantic notions of a sailing life crashes his boat into a railroad bridge, nearly killing his wife. Divorced, ashamed, and haunted by the tragedy, Chad tries to leave the river and its memories behind, only to be drawn back years later. At a ramshackle marina north of Portland, he lives and works among a motley assortment of houseboat dwellers and liveaboards, each with their own story and their own reasons to distrust or embrace a newcomer who can’t quite commit to being one of them.

There’s Dory and Marge, one a dreamer, the other a purveyor of hot dogs and gossip, necessary glue for a community literally tied together in the current; there’s Barry, the Catholic priest who has lost his faith; Bernice and Bill, a perfect couple on the verge of fracturing; and there’s Jack, who has lived on the river his entire life—before speedboats, before electricity, and before shotguns went out of style as a way of settling disputes.

As the seasons bring changes to the river, Chad and this makeshift community change each other in unexpected ways, learning to love, to trust, and to heal.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherOoligan Press
Release dateMay 1, 2017
ISBN9781932010930
At the Waterline
Author

Brian K. Friesen

For several years, Brian Friesen called his sailboat home. He worked in various Portland-area marinas along the Columbia River, cultivating his reality of gritty community life upon the river. No longer muddied up on a sailboat, Brian has shifted his perspective of river life to a home along the Tualatin, outside Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two children. Brian was the recipient of the James Patrick Folinsbee Award for creative writing at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada—where he received a Master of Arts degree in English. His stories and essays have appeared in R.KV.R.Y. Literary Journal, The Music Liberation Project, The Portland Spectator, and A Write Around Portland Anthology. Brian has also been active in other realms of storytelling; he produced a poetry radio show for Golden Hours at OPB radio, performed an oral history of a Northwest Native American elder (available at the Oregon Historical Society), and has volunteered at a number of northwestern organizations, including Willamette Writers and Write Around Portland.

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    At the Waterline - Brian K. Friesen

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