Gordon MacRae Blog

William Finnegan on surfing and being taken seriously as a writer. the piece he talks about writing for 7 years is Surfing Doc’s Waves.

Did your surfing and literary interests feel separate, as in potentially conflicting?

No, then yes, then no. When I was young and writing fiction, I could pursue both things just by living in a place where I could surf. That was still true after I became a freelance journalist, living in San Francisco, and wrote my first book, Crossing the Line, which is about a year I spent teaching in a black high school in Cape Town.

But then I got an assignment to write a piece for The New Yorker about surfing in San Francisco.

That bastard took me seven years to write, partly because I was worried about the reaction of the main character to how the piece was evolving—I thought he might not like it, and indeed he didn’t—but also because I got nervous about coming out of the closet, as it were, as a surfer.

During those seven years, I had moved to New York, gotten hired at The New Yorker, published a couple more books, and written many articles for the magazine.

I wrote a lot for the “Talk of the Town” section, which was a terrific way to get to know the city, but I was mainly writing political stuff—both editorials and long reported pieces. So I was publicly engaged in various debates—over U.S. policy in Central America and Southern Africa, democracy and economic development, national anti-poverty policy, criminal justice, the so-called war on drugs, and so on. And somewhere along the line I started thinking that, if I revealed that I was a lifelong surfer, I might find myself no longer being taken seriously by other policy geeks.

Oh, you’re just a dumb surfer, what do you know? Public intellectuals can be like kids in junior high. Those misgivings turned out to be unfounded. I finally finished the piece, published it, and nobody seemed to decide I was secretly Jeff Spicoli.

In fact, I wrote quite a bit in that piece about the tension between wanting to surf and wanting to move to New York, where I felt my future was, and where I thought there would be no waves. (Wrong, thank God.)