Jeff Hull has come to Big Sandy now for a number of years. He loves the area and its people. He wants to especially thank Craig and Vonnie Sterry for their hospitality. Their cabin outside of Hingham was where he wrote the entire book. Ray and Amy Sibra let him stay with them off and on for over a decade and without them the book simply would not exist. Josh Danreuther and Nathan Merrill took him out on the landscape and helped him see it in new and fascinating ways.
"I don't know why I write books. They say everyone has a book in them but not everyone gets it out. There is some arrogance in it. That I am going to write something that someone else will want to read and enjoy. I don't know if the book has a purpose, but I know it is inspired. It is inspired by this community. There is a feeling that comes over me when I am here when I see the landscape, when I see the light on the landscape. It's better than drinking that first beer. The warmth and the feeling of contentment that I am here at the right place at the right time. It just feels so good to me. Being here makes me feel really good, so I wanted to describe that to other people."
The characters are all fiction. Local people will find their names in the book. "So, I just borrowed the names of people locally for the book randomly, because I could and there are perfectly good names running around so why make them up." The names have nothing to do with the characters in the book.
He grew up in a small town and small towns are like small towns everywhere. "You are challenged by a lack of choice. You are challenged by everybody knowing your business. It's hard to be an individual in a place where you feel you are being judged all the time. Whether you are or not, you feel that way, most of the time you are not, but it feels that way, especially when you are a kid. I tried to tell people in New York what it is like in a town of 600 people. You are visible all the time. Everybody sees what you do. It doesn't make you a good person, but everybody sees when you aren't a good person. People (like in New York) don't understand that you have to get along with everybody."
"Montanans are really stoic especially rural Montanans and very independent. Very Proud of that, very self-sufficient, but no-one makes it through alone. You always need somebody's help somewhere along the way. The town in the book is made up. I did name the bar Pep's because of Josh. I love this place." Jeff didn't want the book to represent just the town of Big Sandy, but all of rural Montana. He doesn't want people to think that he wrote this book thinking people in Big Sandy are shallow and vain. Every story has to have a bad guy. Writing is about tension and conflict. People in Big Sandy who have read the book have recognize the culture of rural Montana but other than that they recognize the story line is just that a story.
He's written eight books, but only published three. Jeff has written for hundreds of magazines-all most all of the outdoor magazines, lots of fly fishing magazines, all the sailing magazines, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Travel, and most of the travel magazines. He's written for 30 years making his living by writing, so "I don't know if I'm an accomplished writer, but I've written a lot. You don't make a lot of money being a magazine writer, so you have to keep pumping it out in order to stay fed."
"I choose to write this particular book because I wanted to have layers, child raising and team sports. You learn so many things on a team sport that you can't learn anywhere else." The book has an eight-man football team at the center of the book. "It's about making choices, you don't have a lot of choices to make here, but you still have to make good ones. Or you pay for it for the rest of your life. There is a scene in the book where two guys, who are older like 80 years old and they are drunk, but they get in a fist fight over something that happened 10 years before." We laughed because the truth of it. "The other layer I wanted to put in was about people who work with their hands and get dirty every day, whether they like it or not, but they have to if they want to eat." He doesn't believe there are enough books that celebrate the working man.
You might be able to find a book at Pep's or purchase one on Amazon.
