Shipwrecks and Other Stories

In Shipwrecks and Other Stories, we read of men and women struggling in love and longing, adultery and addiction, between staying in a place and moving on, while trying to rediscover who they are. Characters in these tales haunt the fringes of their own lives shipwrecked in society as they seek identity, hoping to rescue themselves.

Jerry D. Mathes II a Jack Kent Cooke alumnus and is the author of Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire, winner of the North American Book Prize; an essay collection Fever and Guts: A Symphony; The Journal West: Poems, and Still Life, the winner of the Meadow Prize for the Novella. His photography, poems, essays, and short stories, have won numerous awards. In 2011, he produced a short film, “Drinking Sangria in the Cold War,” which was adapted from one of his award winning short stories. He has worked as a martial arts instructor, an armor crewman, a construction worker, hotel auditor, car salesman, repo-man, delivery guy, cable guy, went logging, worked in forestry, crewed on several types of fishing vessels, fought wildfire on a helicopter-rappel crew, taught writing at the University of Idaho and Stephen F. Austin State University and taught the Southernmost Writers Workshop in the World at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station Antarctica during the 2009-2010 and 2011-2012 Austral summer seasons where he worked in logistics. He also wrote and directed two short films while at the South Pole. In 2012 he produced a video essay about wildfire. He loves his two daughters very much.