I was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1942 and spent the next thirteen years as an Army brat, living in Germany and up and down the east coast of the U.S. I liked being an Army kid, despite all the constant moving - my mother informs me we moved twenty six times, and I know I went to twelve different schools before I got out of high school. There was always a lot of great boy stuff to do on Army bases and there was a real camaraderie among the kids - you made friends fast and you saw them go just as quick.

After my father retired, I went to high school in Conemaugh, Pennsylvania, and Fort Myers, Florida, and college at the University of Florida in Gainesville. While at college I met my future wife, Annetje Lawrence. Upon graduation with a degree in English Lit, I bid the aforementioned Ms Lawrence goodbye forever and put in a summer as a floor sweeper in Chicago and then hitchhiked around Mexico and the southern U.S. Being imminently draftable and it being in the Viet Nam war era, and my not wanting to have my throat cut in some hot and bug infested foxhole, I joined the Navy and four months later I was a spanking new officer in the U.S. Navy, assigned to the the Mediterranean Fleet. The closest I got to combat was in various bars in Italy, France, Spain, and Malta. During this time I also renewed acquaintance with the inestimable Miss Annetje Lawrence, and in 1966, during one of my few times in port, we were married.

After my release from the service, we did our year in New York City where I worked as a social worker and took graduate art courses at Columbia University. We then relocated to Scituate, Massachusetts, and I enrolled in Boston University's Master of Fine Arts program, receiving my MFA in Painting in '73. While at B.U. I published two children's picture books with Little, Brown, and Company. I taught high school art for seven years at Rockland High School in Rockland, Massachusetts, and we had two sons, Matthew and Nathaniel, who are both now painters and teachers. Annetje and I left teaching in 1981 to set up a silk screen printing and design shop on Fort Myers Beach, Florida, and while there we lived on a forty-foot houseboat moored in Matanzas Pass. We soon had retail shops both on Fort Myers Beach and in Bar Harbor, Maine. ( We had purchased land on the Downeast coast of Maine in 1971, built a house and have summered there ever since.)

In 1998 we closed up the Florida operation and moved to Maine full time, and we now have the Clair de Loon Gallery in Bar Harbor. We live in the small fishing village of Corea.

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The Birth of Jacky Faber, protagonist of Bloody Jack

My wife and I have a small art gallery in Bar Harbor, Maine, wherein we sell matted and framed prints of my art work. We sell quite a few of these prints and they all have to be matted and framed and, at the time, I was the one that got to do it.

While the work is gratifying - people are buying my artwork after all - it is repetitive and the mind is free to wander. So, one day in the summer of 2000, I'm framing away in my workshop and listening to British and Celtic folk music on our local community radio station, when the host of the program plays a long string of early nineteenth century songs that feature young girls dressing up as boys and following their boyfriends out to sea, the most well known of these being Jackaroe and Cana-di-i-o. These songs generally end up with the girl being found out quickly and threatened with being thrown overboard, but all ends happily when she either marries the boy or the captain.

It occurred to me, however, to wonder what it would be like if the girl, instead of seeking to be with her lover, connives to get on board a British warship in order to just eat regularly and have a place to stay, her being a starving orphan on the streets of early 1800's London. What would she have to do to pull off this deception for a long period of time? What if she goes through the changes of adolescence while on board in the company of 408 rather rough men and boys, and her not having much of a clue as to what is happening to her? What if this ship goes into combat and she has to do her dangerous duty? And, finally, what if she falls in love with one off the boys and can never tell him of her female nature?

I started making notes and seven months later Bloody Jack was done.

Louis A. & Annetje Lawrence Meyer
2005