Jerry Merritt

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Jerry Merritt

Bio

I was born in Pensacola, Florida, a few minutes before midnight one Tuesday in late September and spent my early life in and around the small, frame house my dad built on the banks of Escambia Bay. Today, that area is known as Florida Town. But  back then, we were the only family out there. To get to our home, we followed a sandy, two-track way that was sheltered by hickory trees and live oaks as it wound through blueberry and gall berry bushes and out to the shore.

Raised by dogs

The house itself we called the “Pig House” because of the wild hogs that roamed the area, and it’s  memorialized under the same name in A Gift of Diamonds. My three dogs are in that novel, too, though the names were changed from Rastus, Blondie, and Cookie to Rastus, Sport, and Trixie – to protect the innocent. Actually, that novel started as an autobiography of my first ten years so that my sister, Linda, who is six years younger than me, could learn what the family was doing before she was old enough to form her own memories. Because, by the time she came along, everything had changed.

So, as was true for the protagonist of A Gift of Diamonds, my  first memories were of the Pig House and of the dogs who raised me for the first five years of my life. It’s not that my parents didn’t participate in my upbringing as well. They did, but I have more memories of the dogs in those early years than I do of my parents. Mainly because I spent more time running the woods with the dogs than I spent at home. And neither of my parents were what might be known today as “helicopter” parents. Out there in the utter isolation of the woods with my canine companions, I  would bark directions to get the dogs to run up to the gate, down to the water, or to gather at my feet. On seeing this, my mother finally realized it was time to move into the city so that I would have a chance to familiarize myself with civilization a bit before entering school.

So much for that plan. My entry into society began that first day of kindergarten, as did a long line of faux pas rising from my somewhat-solitary upbringing. The handwriting was on the chalkboard when Miss Elsie called all of us together to take what I understood to be “row call.” Well, this was good news. I already knew how to row. We’d had an old wooden skiff at the Pig House. So I settled in, waiting for some actual fun because, to my mind, there had been a shortage of it since I’d been dropped off that morning.

But row call was nothing like anything I’d experienced before. And having been born in late September, I had not been allowed to enroll at the start with Miss Elsie’s other kids because I wasn’t yet five, so the rest of the class was almost a month ahead of me in the kindergarten skill set. But I was game to try to figure out what the devil the point of row call was.

My excitement mounted as Miss Elsie called out seemingly random names, to which seemingly random kids called out, “Present.” Now I knew what a present was and became quite motivated to do the right thing to get one for myself. Of course I didn’t see any actual presents being handed out, but I figured that came later. Finally Miss Elsie called out, “Mikey,” and no one answered. I could only conclude that it was now my turn to claim a present, so I provided the appropriate response and the game moved on. I felt quite clever to have been able to decipher such arcane rules with no coaching whatever beforehand.

Then Miss Elsie called out, “Jerry.” Silence. “Jerry Merritt.” More silence. Finally she looked at me and said, “You’re supposed to answer present when I call your name.”

But I was way ahead of her. I announced proudly that I had already answered earlier. I started to add, “And without even anyone telling me how to play.” But all the other kids were laughing their little butts off and pointing to me. I beamed at my cleverness and ability to entertain such a large group on my first day. Mercifully, we relocated to Tampa a few weeks later.

Pan American Solar Water Heater unit

Linda was born in Tampa, where my dad had moved us to help his father-in-law, Edward Lorin Brigman, set up Pan American Solar Heating, Inc., the first solar energy company in the U.S. and, according to some historians, in the world. But it went bust after the Eisenhower Administration came to power and cancelled the public works projects that were buying most of the solar water heaters.

Sunday School Heretic

Meanwhile I had made friends in Tampa, and we spent our time roaming the surrounding woods and exploring the enchanting drainage system underlying the city. Those massive drainage tunnels fired our imaginations as we wound our way through them to finally exit on Tampa Bay below the causeway. It was all wonderful.

But back to the autobiography I started for my sister a while back. I got carried away as I was writing it and veered off the path of my actual life into a novel.

Now, obviously, a lot of experiences intervened between the Pig House and my late, literary career. I had been set to enter a post-graduate program in oceanography when the Vietnam War got in the way. Drafted into the Army, I quickly signed up in the Navy to maximize the probability of maintaining the largest collection of my original body parts I could.  So I became a sailor, both in the U.S. Navy, assigned to a destroyer escort, and later, with my own Taiwanese ketch, Pilot. I later became an Air Force officer, an engineer, historian, genealogist, computer programmer, amateur astronomer, scout master, and eventually, writer. But I never got to be an oceanographer.

Actually, the military was the best thing that could have happened to me. The Service changed me completely. For the better, I should add.

So that brings us back around to the writing.

Several of my books take place in the Deep South, which is my passion, but I also have books on archaeology, time travel, family sagas and historical fiction. And I have co-written books on Florida history from the time of Spanish ownership to the early nineteen-hundreds. I try to draw on that broad experience to lend a depth to my stories and to generate characters that will capture the reader’s imagination and remain with them long after the story is over. That is my only reason for writing. I know I’ll never get rich from it but I am fortunate to have the freedom to write whatever I please, so that’s what I do.

I wrote my first novel, Pulses, on a typewriter while stationed in Germany. After no one expressed interest in publishing those breezy, 240,000 words, I followed up with the much-shorter A Measure of the Earth. Then I wrote nothing for the next quarter century. After the house fire detailed on the Poetry page, I lived in a rental for two years and, to kill the boredom, wrote four more novels while sitting on a barstool at the kitchen counter: Time Pebbles, A Gift of Diamonds, A Season of Tides, and A Gift of Time, in that order.

My newest  novel, completed in 2018 and to be published after final editing, grew out of my sister’s concern for me during a recent dark period of my life. Darker even than she realized. She suggested we write something about all the stuff we got into trouble over as kids. I told her it would be hard to turn our youthful indiscretions into a novel – even given the extraordinary number of incidents precipitated – but we’d try.

And that starting premise became Diary of a Teenage Moon Goddess. By the time it was finished, she had quit worrying about me – not that that was necessary to begin with. But I did enjoy working with her as we passed the day’s work back and forth. She wrote the diary entries for the Moon Goddess and I wrote the rest of the novel. As a little sister, Linda has played a major role in my life over the years. Larger even than she knows. Everyone should be so lucky to have such a sister.

Anyway, for now I am back on track with my wordplay as I rewrite Pulses into a trilogy while also refining Moon Goddess. After that I hope to start another novel with the working title The Portals of Osiris, a science fiction work dealing with the pyramids of Giza and their mysterious secrets. That one may end up tying into Pulses if Linda gets her way. We’ll see.

Well, that should be enough about me to torture the average reader. Thank you for stopping by. I hope you enjoy the rest of the website.

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Site design by Elizabeth Lowrey in consultation with Jerry Merritt.