The Story Behind "The Jetty"

The Write Stuff: Writing Tips, Tricks & Inspiration

I recently wrote about the inspiration for my short story “The Big South.” Most of the handful of short stories I’ve had published are from my linked story collection, California Is an Earthquake, coming in fall 2027 from Sibylline Press. If you read and enjoyed “The Big South,” the characters from that story make a cameo appearance in my short story “The Jetty.”

“The Jetty” is one of two stories I’ve written that were inspired by a ghost story I heard growing up in Coronado, California, about the ghost of Kate Morgan. I wrote about Kate Morgan here: The Ghost of the Hotel Del Coronado.

The other story inspired by the ghost story I heard is called “Ghosts” and will appear in my book California Is an Earthquake. I came up with the idea for that story on a drive from San Luis Obispo to Palm Desert. I was thinking about the ghost of Kate Morgan, as I do, and I started asking myself “what if” questions. “Ghosts” came out of that long drive and that deep thinking about something from my childhood.

After I wrote “Ghosts,” I found I still had some other “what if” questions, and those questions led to “The Jetty.” I combined those questions with a memory from my childhood: me alone on the beach when I was about 9 years old (my siblings and I were definitely free-range kids), digging around in some rocks to try to find a hermit crab to take home as a pet. I remember looking out at the jetty and thinking about going out on it, but I never did.

I wanted to share with you the story of how “The Jetty” came to be because that’s how my mind works, and I think that’s one of the reasons so many of my stories are linked, like Elizabeth Strout’s often are. I write one story, and then I’m still caught up in the characters and asking myself what will happen to them next, or what would happen if this or that happened to be true?

I hope this post inspires you to think deeply about something that’s haunted you since childhood, and if you’re a writer or have a desire to write, to perhaps get a story idea from it. Those are often the things I write about—things that keep haunting me and don’t seem to leave me alone until I write about them.