Kevin C. Morris

Kevin C. Morris's debut novel is Untamed Coast.

An engineer, writer, boater, pilot, entrepreneur, and occasional deckhand, he brings a lifelong curiosity about technology and the natural world to his storytelling.

Born and raised in Texas, Morris has made Portland, Oregon, his home for more than forty years, but spends his summers navigating the Inside Passage to Southeast Alaska—a rugged landscape that fuels both his adventures and his fiction.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Untamed Coast is set in the Alexander Archipelago of Southeast Alaska, and the setting is absolutely a main character. The story weaves three narratives across three timelines spanning eighty years, and the wild, magnificent, and dangerous place is the common thread connecting them all together. My working title was Radioville — the name of a remote island along the rugged coast where the lives of all the characters intersect.

In today’s publishing world, publishers decide titles, not authors. And as a result, titles are often more marketing devices than creative opportunities. I’m lucky to have a publisher who worked collaboratively (and exhaustively) with me to find a title that evoked the story and character of the book and was in line with my vision, while also checking the boxes on important marketing considerations such as genre appeal and target demographic expectations. As much as I was in love with Radioville, Untamed Coast does far more work setting reader expectations for a mystery/thriller in a wilderness adventure setting.

What's in a name?

For me, names are an opportunity to be creative, to encode hints about characters’ backgrounds or nature. My main character is Marconi “Marco” Franco. Marco is a grieving widower exploring the coast of SE Alaska in his boat Radio Flyer. He’s also got a lifelong passion for radio as an amateur radio enthusiast, and he is named after Guglielmo Marconi who developed the first wireless radios for transmitting Morse code. Morse code is a theme throughout the book, and I’ve even included little Easter eggs - Morse code chapter titles that readers can decipher. My female lead is Anya Baron, born and raised in SE Alaska, and a reluctant descendant of Alexander Baranov - a brutal Russian colonizer and first governor of Russian America.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage-reader self was a science fiction and wilderness adventure nerd. My parents were both school teachers as well as private pilots, and we spent our summers exploring the western US and Canada in our pickup camper and flying light planes and boating across the Southwestern US. I carried that drive to travel and explore into my adult life, along with my passions for science, engineering, writing, and music. Untamed Coast is absolutely an expression of the interests I developed growing up. So, I think my teenage-reader self would be surprised if I hadn’t written this novel.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

For me, the beginning is everything. I have a vision for my characters, and I put them in an environment and in a situation that uniquely challenges them. From that point on, it’s just gravity. What would that character do in this scenario, and then what would inevitably go wrong? So, the ending ultimately writes itself. But, as a writer we have the spectacularly fun superpower of time travel. Think a scene or an ending would be more exciting or interesting if something different had happened before? No problem, just slip back a few chapters and rewrite history. So, I feel the setup is everything. Get the perfect beginning and the roadmap from there to the end just unfolds like magic.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

In Untamed Coast, Marco is definitely (and obviously) the character that most closely resembles me. In many ways, he’s just a “me” that was dealt a different set of life circumstances, and who deals with those in (mostly) ways that I’d realistically aspire to. But he’s got some pretty major flaws as well. Other characters are riffs on that idea, but with much more varied starting points. “What would I do if I were a woman in an abusive relationship with a commercial fisherman in SE Alaska?” Still others are amalgamations of characters I’ve known or heard stories of in my travels.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

There’s a pretty solid line from my passion for boating, exploring SE Alaska, wilderness, wildlife, food, and music to Untamed Coast.

There’s a scene in the book where Marco first learns about Radioville that is based almost exactly on my own real-world experience finding Radioville while traveling SE Alaska with my wife on our boat. I like to include as much of the real world in my writing as possible. I work to make the locations, the people, the technologies, the music, the food – everything I depict – as realistic as possible so that the story comes across as authentic, believable, and relatable.

Music, in particular, plays a key role. Untamed Coast weaves three timelines: 1938, 1984, and 2017. I wanted to make the transitions as clear and seamless as possible for the reader. One of the best tools for that was music. Each timeline features music of that era, played on technology of that era. The music selections tell us something about the characters as well, and the music selections usually relate directly to what is happening in the narrative at the time. I also am personally prone to earworms, and thought it would be fun to use music references to put a soundtrack in the reader’s mind as they read different sections of the book.

Visit Kevin C. Morris's website.

--Marshal Zeringue