One Year, Two Journeys, Two Memoirs

When I stepped onto my new husband’s 26-foot sailboat in San Diego, bound for Cabo San Lucas, I was a 28-year-old actress with no boating experience. Never could I have imagined that our proposed three-month honeymoon in Baja California’s Sea of Cortez would evolve into a year afloat that would change my life completely. 

The year was 1990. 

That same year Judy Reeves, nearing 50 and still grieving her late husband Tom, decided to sell everything, buy a plane ticket, and take a solo ’round the world trip. Though she had no desire to continue her career in television and journalism, she could not have guessed how the trip she was about to embark on would change her life. Listening to the tiny voice inside her that said “go,” she went.

Many years later, when I met Judy Reeves, she was already the founder of The Writing Center in downtown San Diego, and my mother, a poet and dedicated journal writer, had brought me there. That center faltered, but Judy persevered, and soon she’d co-founded San Diego Writers, Ink (SDWI), a nonprofit literary center where we both teach, though my classes are nowhere as frequent.

We both also teach at the Southern California Writers’ Conference where, in 2010, Judy and I got the chance to hang out and chat, years after our first meeting. We had a great deal in common, in terms of how we looked at writing, and life, and discovered that we were both thinking about writing memoirs of our travels—experiences that were inner and outer journeys, though Judy was writing a novel at the time. I expressed a desire to read her memoir when she was ready to share it, but since my day job is editing she demurred, saying it wasn’t ready yet.

In the summer of 2020, I donated a content edit to SDWI’s Blazing Laptops annual fundraiser and Judy, the top fundraiser, handily won it. It turned out that she’d put the novel on hold, and was working on her memoir, and she thought this gift too good of an opportunity to pass up. So she finished the rewrite she was doing, and a couple of months later, she sent me the manuscript. Her note that accompanied it read, in part, “The manuscript in current form is 338 pages and 101,559 words. That would be a few thousand too many words and I know you’ll make good suggestions for where to cut.” I think by the time she sent it to me again for the line edit, the ms was at 92,500 words. We had a wonderful time working on it together; some friends cannot successfully make the leap to working together, but we did. 

The process of distilling down her beautiful, heartfelt prose—mostly cutting repetitions, of which there were many over the course of months of travel journals—got me excited about getting back to work on the collection of essays and short pieces that I envisioned would one day become my Baja sailing memoir, and which had been languishing for years. Seeing Judy’s writing take shape into a beautifully structured manuscript got me to thinking that my next project should be my own. Rereading my work, it occurred to me that my manuscript was, like Judy’s, an origin story. Hers the story of a writer who became a mentor to other writers, mine a writer who became an editor.

Traveling in 2021 distracted me from doing much more than editing other people’s work, but I did begin polishing chapters of my memoir, and rearranging them, trying to find the elusive whole these disparate parts would become—like doing a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with no idea of the picture I was creating. 

I was thrilled when Judy chose She Writes Press, as I knew of their fine work on two lovely books by Jill Hall and Leslie Johansen Nack, both of which I edited. The press has great distribution and understands placement, too. Her manuscript went to She Writes for copyediting and design and her pub date was set for October of 2023. My work done, I looked forward to seeing her book in print.

In the summer of 2022, I came across a post on social media from Rebecca Eckler, a new publisher in Canada who was looking for unusual memoirs by adventurous women. I looked up her company, Re:Books, and liked what I saw, so I saved the first fifty pages of the current version of my memoir manuscript, which I was finally happy with, and sent the PDF off with a query letter. I was pleased to hear back from Rebecca about a month later that she’d liked my pages and wanted the full manuscript. I started to read it over again, but then thought, no, I’ll send her what I have right now, and wait for her feedback before rewriting. 

But in January, Rebecca said she wanted to publish my book—and because she thought it was so well-edited, she wanted it to come out in the fall. Yes, after all those years, my “Honeymoon at Sea,” came out September 19th, just a couple of weeks before Judy’s “When Your Heart Says Go.” So it was that two stories of life-changing journeys taken in 1990, by two writers who didn’t become friends until 2010, came to fruition, and were both published, in 2023.

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Jennifer Silva Redmond, the author of “Honeymoon at Sea: How I Found Myself Living on a Small Boat” (Sept 2023, re:books, Toronto), is an editor who blogs at www.jennyredbug.com and on the Substack newsletter Honeymoon at Sea. Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Sunbelt Publications, an award-winning small press based in San Diego, she is now their Editor-at-Large. Acclaimed authors whose books she has edited include Jasmin Iolani Hakes, Judy Reeves, Daniel Reveles, Gayle Carline, and Eric Peterson. Jennifer is on the staff of the Southern California Writer’s Conference and San Diego Writers, Ink. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Science of Mind, A Year in Ink vol 11 & 12, and Latinos in Lotusland. She was prose editor for A Year in Ink, volume 3, and co-founded the critically acclaimed Sea of Cortez Review (1998-2001). She and artist-writer-teacher Russel Redmond live on their sailboat somewhere on the west coast of North America.

HONEYMOON AT SEA, Jennifer Silva Redmond

When Jennifer Shea married Russel Redmond, they made a decision to spend their honeymoon at sea, sailing in Mexico. The voyage tested their new relationship, not just through rocky waters and unexpected weather, but in all the ways that living on a twenty-six-foot sailboat make one reconsider what’s truly important.

In this charming, meditative memoir, Jennifer recounts that fateful first year, moving back and forth with the currents of her life. On their voyage, the couple sailed Watchfire to Baja California’s Sea of Cortez, where they spent twelve months before sailing south along Mexico and Central America and through the Panama Canal. Jennifer’s unique experience on the boat weaves through time as she explores the events that lead to taking her first step onto Watchfire—from her bohemian 1960s childhood in Southern California to the years she spent as a struggling actor in New York.

As Jennifer’s grandfather once said, “If you want to get to know someone, take a long trip in a small boat.”

The memoir begins and ends with the couple on their current sailboat in San Diego and then in Port Townsend, Washington. More than thirty years later, their honeymoon at sea continues.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing