#5 The names of your characters are quite distinctive. How did Dodge, Pogy, Digger and Shutterspeed come about?

Dodge Lawson was the name I gave to a character in a story about stock car racing that never got finished. I sort of liked the sound of it, although my daughter's reaction was that "he sounds like a character in a Nancy Drew book." Digger is a name remembered from my childhood. In every small town it seemed like the undertaker had that for a nickname. Shutterspeed is the name of my friend Jim Strickland's boat. (He's a photographer, and a good one.) Pogy is one of the many nicknames for menhaden, a fish that is useless as food but is probably the single most important species in the Mid-Atlantic Bight because so many other fish feed on them. In the winter these oily critters gather off the beach in huge schools (what the fisheries biologists call "biomass"), setting the dinner table for king mackerel, striped bass, and giant bluefin tuna, among others. In his book John McPhee called American Shad "The Founding Fish." Maybe a pogy is "The Essential Fish." At any rate he's the essential character.

#6 The characters themselves are unusual. Are they works of imagination or have you met people like Pogy, for example?

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people or events is pure coincidence. But of course any character (who is, after all, nothing more than some ink on dead trees) has to be borrowed from experience, whether it was something I saw or read about or even encountered in a dream. In the process of writing and endlessly re-writing I put different quirks and figures of speech and physical traits into the blender so many times that every character in the book is at best a puree' of actual people. This is especially true for my narrator, Dodge, who's nothing like me. As for these characters being "unusual," if I wrote about some of the people I've known in this so-called real life, it might be labeled science fiction.

#7 Dodge has been described as a man in middle--someone who sees all but doesn't take sides. Overall, the book avoids making a judgment on one side or the other. At times however, there are indications that Dodge might be less impartial than he seems. Is this true?

Another place where Dodge is in the middle is in not being sure if he's fair and impartial, or just confused and lacking conviction. Maybe there are only three things of which he's certain. First, he is in love with Ilse. Second, he can trust Johnny, and they will always be loyal to one other. Third, he prefers that his beaches and marsh islands not be covered in buildings and pavement. On this third point, though, he's willing to concede that it may be just personal preference, and that others have a right to prefer their condos and marinas with golf carts. They may be insufferable idiots, but in Dodge's experience there's plenty of that on every side of every issue. So he is, as the shrinks say, conflicted.

#8 How do you hope the real-life counterparts to the book's characters (fishermen, developers, environmentalists, etc..) will react to the book?

My intention is to tell a story, not change the world or anyone's mind. I hope that fishermen, developers, and turtle huggers (I mean, environmentalists) would all read the book because it's a good story about familiar places and people. Saltwater Cowboys is about what's going on here, now, and in that I think it's rather unique. (In the way that Carl Hiaasen's books about South Florida couldn't really have been written in another place by anyone else.) I hope the book will make everybody, no matter what demographic, laugh out loud one minute and get angry the next. Which is a lot like life, isn't it? In this story everyone's pet fish gets gaffed at least once. In fact, when I discovered that I needed a bad guy I put him in the demographic group that's most like my own, because I learned a long time ago that if you're going to dish it out, then you'd better be able to take it, too.

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