About James ~

At 48, James left his formal career in community mental health to start a non-traditional boarding lodge for family dogs. Walking in the meadow every morning with a couple dozen canine companions has been good for his soul, restoring his yen and moxie for writing—first with award-winning poetry, and now with his debut novel, LOON.
As a very young child, the elements of water, woods, and sky shaped his internal landscape during seven endless summers on a lake in northern Ontario, Canada. Nature arrived first, before culture could stake its claim. The magnetic pull of the primal domain has drawn him outside, looking out, throughout his life.
In his young adult years, James studied psychology and religion, and today, he still wanders in that heart-mind borderland with both struggle and wonder. Navigating our mysterious existence is the subject of his daily contemplations and conversations.
James is "learning horses" these days, following his wife, Silvia, into a new non-profit called Kava HorseWorks. With his guidance, those who come to work with our fellow creatures will learn to write their own stories of growth and change.
Songwriting and photography are James's less public avocations. In the simple moments, James takes joy in being with his family and friends—around the kitchen table, on mountain trails, on the river, or barefoot along some far-flung stretch of beach.
If you enjoy journeying through the pages of LOON, please consider leaving a brief review on Amazon or Goodreads. Your words help other readers find this story and mean the world to an indie author.

Original block print cover art by Lyn Erie / Book format and design by Cherie Hill

LOON is a psychological drama, a family saga spanning the distance between childhood trauma and the life and death reality of true recovery, and a perfect read for fans of The God of the Woods, Crow Talk, Where the Crawdads Sing, and old classics like Never Cry Wolf, or My Side of the Mountain. LOON chimes nicely with Richard Power's beautiful tale Bewilderment.

Matthew Fisher was eleven when his childhood ended on a lake in Northern Minnesota. One minute he was a sheltered kid with a patient father; the next, he was completely alone in the deep woods, forced to choose between paddling toward a surreptitiously troubled home or disappearing into the wild. He chose the wild.

By the time a seaplane pulled him off a backwater island weeks later, he wasn’t the same boy. The wild had taken root inside him.

Now he’s in Colorado, marooned in the quiet house of an uncle he barely knows, alongside Crawford, a boy tied to him only by mutual trauma and isolation. He's often found slipping backward, driven by guarded instincts that no one can decode.

Enter Dr. Althea Wright. She’s a clinical psychologist hired to analyze the Fisher family's wreckage and fix the damaged boy. She is supposed to keep a professional distance. Instead, Matthew’s misanthropic complexities trigger something volatile in her own hidden history. Her boundaries dissolve. She steps out from behind her clinical journals, drawn into an obsessive role as the self-appointed matriarch of this vulnerable, patchwork family.

James Scott Smith’s LOON offers no easy path to recovery. It causes you to wonder if a boy who has tasted total, lawless freedom can ever truly survive civilization—and whether Althea is saving this family, or just drowning in her own secret longings.

TAVA CREATIVE PRESS