Author Pierce Koslosky Jr.’s first book, A Week at Surfside Beach: A Collection of Short Stories, will be published June 9, 2020. Starting as a poet, this collection was inspired by the blue beach house he and his family go to every year in Surfside Beach, South Carolina and by the entries left behind in the guest book.
Q: What took you so long to write your first book?
A: That is a cautionary tale. I’ve wanted to be a writer since forever, and I wrote a lot of poetry when I was young and unencumbered. I always “knew” I would write…someday. But not much came of that presumed self-knowledge; there was always another hole in the dike of life that required yet another finger.
Then when I turned 50, I made a deal with myself that I would publish a book by the time I was 60—I mean ten years, right?—Well, I missed my goal by nine years. But after I made that pact with myself, I began making the time and I started to write—again. I wrote my first short story at age 54, and it isn’t even in the book; it was a mess. But I had started, and not telling a soul what I was doing, I kept writing. I tried to write a story on each of our fall beach trips, and one shiny day I realized that I now had several stories, and that I had achieved critical mass. I got serious about rewrites, the beach-rental-season framework came to me as in a dream, and then the whole thing came to life. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” (George Eliot)
Q: Why is a Nebraskan writing about the beach?
A: I grew up in New Jersey—an East Coast kid. In the summer we would drive up to Maine or New Hampshire; in the winter we would make the tortuous, pre-McDonalds, two-lane drive to South Florida (where my Dad ended up retiring). I can still hear my Dad’s voice: “Don’t make me come back there!” It was great. It was also pre-sunscreen. I remember trying to see how big a sheet of skin I could pull off of my sunburned leg. I got hooked on the ocean.
The beach was in my blood, but fortune took me to Nebraska. One year my younger brother came back from Surfside Beach, South Carolina and he told me, “It’s just like Florida in the ’60’s.” My wife and I and our twin two-year-olds went to check it out, and we immediately fell in love with the place.
None of this answers the question. I’d say the “why” part is also about the “how” part. It’s at the beach that I feel the most creative. It takes me plenty of time and elbow-room to be able to write. That’s what the beach gives me, and in my own way, that’s what I want to give it back. I want to capture the transforming nature of the place, and so I write about the beach and how it effects people.
Q: What significance does this place and beach house have to you and your family—what has kept you returning year after year?
A: If you go to the same place again and again, just about everything that can happen to you in life—good and bad—will find a way to happen there. After that, the whole thing just becomes self-reinforcing. Your history and its become entwined. A thousand memories. You come to love a place as much for what has happened there as for the place itself.
My brother and his family have been going to Surfside longer than we have, and now they take their kids and grandkids. A few years back they wanted to surprise a six-year-old granddaughter with a trip to Disney World. They told her they were going to Surfside Beach instead, to throw her off the track. When they arrived at the Orlando airport, they said “Surprise!” The child asked, “Aren’t we going to the beach?” When they said “No, we’re going to Disney World!,” she burst into tears.
It’s like that.
Q: How have your life experiences—as a philosophy major, as someone who has worked in the prison system, and as someone who is now a CEO—affected or contributed to what you write about?
A: Well, this couldn’t get cornier, but after my few score years, I have begun to realize how alike we all are. Well, at least similar. It was a systemic shock to be a middle-class white kid walking into a maximum-security prison in North Carolina in 1972. It was 100% “Cool Hand Luke.” But after a few terrified months, I settled in, and the guards were waving me past security. I was seven separate locks away from my car and my desk was one floor directly beneath the gas chamber—but you know what? Anything can become familiar. And why is that? Central Prison was its own weird universe, but the human experience is common to all of us.
Business was a second education. For a recovering Marxist, it was sink or swim. I learned a few things: 1) If you’re “in charge” of people, you soon realize that all you want is for them to want what you want, and you sure as hell aren’t going to get there by yelling at them. 2) Don’t tell someone to do what you can’t do yourself. 3) Some people can be absolutely brilliant, but that’s not everything. You want to know that when you blow that whistle to charge up out of the trench, that you can count on them coming with you, not just “thinking about it.” 4) If someone tells you that they can’t sell your product without a green telephone, buy them the green telephone; then it’s on them. 5) You can’t buy loyalty, but you can earn it. 6) If you claim that you’re in business to make a profit, then share those profits; you’ll always make more when people make more too.
Q: Can you tell us more about your come-to-Jesus epiphany? Does your faith tie in to your writing at all?
A: It’s funny, because there was a long stretch where I was a die-hard atheist and enjoyed making fun of Christians. It was the age of “Jesus Freaks” and communes, but I wasn’t buying it.
When I turned twelve my parents had a sudden spasm of religion, and my siblings and I were hauled off to Catholic church. I was a colossus in my Catechism class of seven-year-olds. I had my Confirmation the week after my first Communion. I became an altar boy. But then my Dad got into a heated argument our priest, and he and my mom stopped going. Sundays my parents would drive us kids to church, drop us off, and pick us back up an hour and a half later. And what a feast would be waiting for us when we got home—donuts! Crumbcake! Never underestimate the dividends that guilt can provide.
They got divorced. It was a long, drawn-out affair—ugly, and very, very loud. When my prayers didn’t change the situation, that was it for me and God.
I still wanted “answers.” I tried everything. I said everything. Transcendental meditation, sitting Zen, Hare Krishna, macrobiotics, past life regression. I went to a healing sounds workshop. I became a second-level Reiki master. I studied with a self-styled Sufi for a year and a half. I had some truly weird and freaky “spiritual experiences,” but everything felt like it was coming from the outside in, if that makes any sense.
And then, there I was, in the midst of my own divorce, feeling like a total failure and thinking, “what’s the point in living?” I was standing in my apartment bathroom, and I cried out to God. Nothing happened. No blinding light, no voices. But…a few days later I was in court to get the divorce granted and I was very upset. And then—while the judge was talking and asking me questions—I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was unmistakably a hand, and I turned to see whose it was, but there was no one there. It was electric, and suddenly I was completely calm. A moment before I was about to jump out of my skin and now I was at peace. That’s when I knew that God is real.
I have said that I am on the “Jesus is Lord!” team…but unaffiliated. I have, in thirty years of believing, experienced a number of miracles—or “God-related coincidences,” if you prefer. How does this affect my writing? I think if you can read through the New Testament and the idea of Hope doesn’t stay with you, you probably ought to read it again. Having been an atheist, I’m very sensitive to people and their own search. My twenty-year-old self would be making fun of me right now. I want to communicate that there is more to life than the five senses, but I want to write and let the reader decide for themselves.
Q: Do you have another project in mind?
A: Yes, I have a large part of a novel sketched out. There’s a middle-aged man, a cult, a grandmother, and a precocious five-year-old. I call it a “comic novel” to myself. I’m having fun with it, but it isn’t there yet. This time I’m hoping to finish a book in less than fourteen years.
PIERCE KOSLOSKY, JR. graduated with a degree in Psychology from Duke University, and then worked three years in North Carolina’s maximum-security prison. He moved to Nebraska, and four decades later is the chairman and CEO of a manufacturing company. He lives in Omaha with Candy, his wife of thirty-five years, and with one very fortunate golden-doodle. They have four children who could not be less alike.
Pierce and his family have gone to Surfside Beach, South Carolina for over twenty-five years. For most of that time they have stayed in blue house on the cover of A Week at Surfside Beach. They bought the home in 2000 and rent it out in summer. Originally a poet, he began writing these short stories fifteen years ago, inspired by entries in their guest book.
A Week at Surfside Beach: A Collection of Short Stories is available June 9, 2020 from Loba Publishing, an imprint of Vertel Publishing. The sixteen short stories in this collection focus on the different couples and families that stay in the blue beach house on Surfside Beach throughout a single rental season that ends at Christmas.
Both original and contemplative, heartbreaking and inspirational, A Week at Surfside Beach explores the relatable yet extraordinary complexities of life and the people attracted to a landscape that is both beautiful and overwhelming in its ability to force introspection and change.
