Hays, Daniel 1960-

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HAYS, Daniel 1960-

PERSONAL: Born January 22, 1960, in New York, NY; son of David (a director) and Leonora (a dancer; maiden name, Landau) Hays; married; wife's name Wendy; children: Stephan (stepson). Education: Connecticut College, B.A.; Antioch College, M.S. Politics: "No." Religion: "Yes." Hobbies and other interests: Tae kwon do, scuba diving, sailing, wilderness survival, "duct tape, and anything I can do passionately."

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, P.O. Box 2225, Chapel Hill, NC 27515-2225.

CAREER: Writer and educator. Wilderness guide and therapeutic supervisor, 1990-95; teacher at Silver Creek Alternative School, Hailey, ID, beginning 1996.

WRITINGS:

(With father, David Hays) My Old Man and the Sea: A Father and Son Sail around Cape Horn, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1995.

On Whale Island: Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Daniel Hays is "a writer, sometime teacher, sailor/sea captain, tae kwon do black belt, and general misfit," according to Carolyn Alexander, writing in Library Journal. Hays and his father, David, undertook a 17,000-mile, 317-day ocean voyage that passed around Cape Horn on the twenty-five-foot sailboat Sparrow in 1985, becoming "the first Americans to do so in such a small vessel," according to Booklist reviewer Brad Hooper. Daniel departed from New London, Connecticut, and headed southward to Jamaica, where his father joined him. They passed through the Panama Canal and sailed over to the Galapagos Islands, down to Easter Island, and around Cape Horn to the Falkland Islands, where David disembarked and flew home. Daniel returned to New London, stopping at Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, and Antigua along the way. My Old Man and the Sea: A Father and Son Sail around Cape Horn recounts the Hayses' nautical odyssey, but as Hooper remarked, "enjoying sailing is definitely not a prerequisite for enjoying their sailing." A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book "an engaging adventure, and a remarkable story of a father-son relationship." Written in the form of a diary, the Hayses' story is narrated alternately by father and son. "The Hayses concentrate on telling the story," observed Library Journal book reviewer John Kenny, "which is remarkably free of the heavy emphasis on equipment, technique, and terms that are usually present in this genre." My Old Man and the Sea "will make you cry and smile and exult, even. It is," concluded William F. Buckley, Jr., writing in New York Times Book Review, "an engrossingly beautiful tale of adventure of the spirit, aboard a little boat that dared great deeds."

Writing on his own, Hays published On Whale Island: Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave in 2002. Following his shipboard adventures with his father, Hays thought he had got the wanderlust out of his body. He settled down to job and marriage, only to discover that he felt lost in the everyday world. Fulfilling a fantasy that many have but never act on, Hays bought a small island off Nova Scotia, built a house there, packed up three boats full of supplies, and moved his wife, stepson, and two dogs to Whale Island. There he and his family learned the art of survival, loving their self-controlled world, until his wife and son longed for bigger horizons and they returned, after a year on the island, to the mainland. Buckley, reviewing the book in National Review, called Hays a "superb writer of the outdoors and the indoors . . . [who] chronicles even his own misanthropy with wit and cunning." Reviewing the book for Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, Dennis McCann felt it was a "story about building a life with a new family." For Erica Sanders, writing in the New York Times Book Review, Hays "is a seemingly un-self-censoring diarist, expanding in great detail on the things that make him look especially incompetent. This is a positive trait for a writer—besides earning a reader's pity, it's entertaining." Such humorous examples of Hays's incompetence are his reliance on rain for the family's drinking water. But with a few days of rainless skies, he is forced to buy bottled water. However, when it does rain, he discovers the roof leaks. He also demonstrates his skill at plumbing by taking a rifle to a clogged pipe. A contributor for Kirkus Reviews called this memoir "a taste of living theater, with all its entanglements, fragments, and doldrums."

Hays once commented: "I write so I am not alone. Passion influences me; that is, everything from madness to lust to love to obsession, etc. My favorite authors are Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Ken Kesey, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Hermann Hesse. I lose myself in love, grief, or chemically induced passion and then get lost in trying to immortalize the moment."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 1995, Brad Hooper, review of My Old Man and the Sea: A Father and Son Sail around Cape Horn, pp. 1721-1722.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2002, review of On Whale Island: Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave, p. 381.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, July 31, 2002, Dennis McCann, review of On Whale Island, p. K1639.

Library Journal, April 15, 1995, John Kenny, review of My Old Man and the Sea, p. 104; February 1, 2003, Carolyn Alexander, review of On Whale Island, p. 136.

National Review, September 16, 2002, William F. Buckley, Jr., review of On Whale Island, p. 56.

New York Times Book Review, July 23, 1995, William F. Buckley, Jr., review of My Old Man and the Sea, pp. 1, 21; July 7, 2002, Erica Sanders, review of On Whale Island, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly, May 15, 1995, review of My Old Man and the Sea, pp. 64-65; April 8, 2002, review of On Whale Island, p. 213.

Yankee, August, 1995, review of My Old Man and the Sea, p. 115.