The Last Wave

Yesterday was my 70th birthday. When I checked my emails I found a nice present: an email from Lorian Hemingway telling me my story, The Last Wave had won third prize in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. It could not be more serendipitous. The story is about ageing, and I received this good news the day I reached the biblical “threescore years and ten”.

Of course, we (us baby boomers) are meant to buy into the prevailing zeitgeist clichés: “life begins at seventy” / “seventy is the new forty” etc, but between you and me, this was not a birthday I was particularly looking forward to. As an old hippie, seventy feels more about nostalgia than life beginning. For sure, I’d prefer to feel forty (new or not) than threescore years and ten, but the most accurate home truth is: “you’re as old as you feel” and I feel… well, seventy 🤨 But that’s OK.

Two things, specifically, were troubling me. Firstly, I gave up windsurfing a few weeks ago. (The photo of me was taken a couple of years ago, at my local beach in Tenerife. Happy days…) It wasn’t an easy decision. Windsurfing has been my passion for the past forty years, but I thought it would be wise to quit while I was winning.

This is, in fact, the theme of my story. Set on the wild west coast of Ireland, it’s about a surfer struggling to come to terms with ageing and searching for something to replace surfing. As he drives to the beach for his last ever dawn patrol, he looks back at the landmark moments in his life: the people, the waves, and the music. I’m suffering the grief and regrets the narrator expresses.

And secondly, although writing has been my other passion since retiring from the music biz, in 2007, I was beginning to doubt whether it could be anything more than a time-consuming, angst-ridden hobby. Fellow writers might empathise: the usual imposter syndrome, craving for validation as the rejections pile up etc.

But then I opened Lorian’s email and Abracadabra! OK, I enter quite a few competitions and I have made a few longlists and highly commendeds, but this was different. What really, really moved me (to tears, in fact) was not only did Lorian send a personalised email, but Oh Boy Did She Connect With My Story, and that made my day. 

What do writers value? Sales, reviews, prizes? No… Well OK, maybe. But what we really crave is to connect with a reader as I did with Lorian (see her email, below). And not just any old reader … Hemingway’s grandaughter!

The book that first got me hooked on the power of stories was ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. I read it aged 15, as a school text, and it just gets better every time I re-read it. It was partly what inspired me to write Too Close to the Wind (the world’s first windsurfing novel).

So there you go … My 70th birthday turned out to be quite memorable, after all.

Here’s Lorian´s email:

Dear Richard,

Lorian here in the early West Coast (United States) hours. Boy are you an amazing writer. I absolutely loved your entry “The Last Wave”. It is such a beautiful, full-of-heart tribute to the passions and memories and music that find such deeply sweet and painful places to dwell in us. I’m an old hippie who just happened to fall in love with surfing when I was 17, who just happened to love Bowie and Zappa, etc. But my love for your story goes far beyond what I have in common with it. You walk the fine line that truly excellent writers do, with a craft that allows the humanity of your story to become the radiant force. And what a powerful force it is, one filled with a wisdom that is not forced upon the reader, but rather evoked. I came away humbled and feeling damned good about the world. I thank you for that experience, that gift.

Thank you so much, Richard. You helped make my year with your story.

Warm wishes,

Lorian