The Whale Road

The Whale Road is a creative nonfiction story based on a true tale, and told to an unborn child, in which a sailor falls off a cliff and turns into an albatross, and a pod of female sperm whales chases the setting sun. The journey begins on a research vessel, as her small crew follow the path of the whale, through the South Pacific. The old whaler's 'Line', was a hunting ground so fertile in the last century that sailors' logs claimed they saw a whale dead of natural causes every nautical mile. The expedition sails from Tahiti to New Zealand, to see if any whales are left at all. This is a story about food, love, and a search for place. The author comes from America and is now married to a New Zealander. She has worked as a glassblower's first assistant, a carpenter, a dive master, and mapped wrecks for underwater archaeologists in the Caribbean. For a decade she crewed as cook in the Atlantic, nanny in the Pacific, and research assistant for a variety of biologists and cetologists in the Sea of Cortez, Bay of Fundy, Milford Sounds and various other bodies of water (including an aquarium in Texas).;She earned a diploma in Wildlife Management from the University of Otago, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she taught writing for six years. She and her husband started a business doing editing and animation, called Lost Arts Editing & Design. This is her first book.