People sometimes ask where stories come from. The honest answer is usually everywhere and nowhere—a convergence of memory and moment that you couldn't have planned if you'd tried.

Last summer, I took my nephew on a seventy-one-mile canoe trek through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, crossing between Minnesota and Canada. It was his first time doing something this monumental—days of paddling through waters I've known for decades, making camp on shores that have shaped me in ways I'm still discovering.

We spent much of that trip in silence. Not the awkward kind. The kind where words become unnecessary because something else is doing the communicating—the rhythm of paddles, the shared work of portaging, the quiet recognition that we were experiencing something together that didn't need narration.

Then the storm hit.

We were blown hours off course. What should have been a manageable day became fourteen hours of paddling against wind and water that wanted us somewhere else entirely. It was harrowing. A genuine test of endurance, of will, of trust in each other and ourselves. When we finally made camp that night, exhausted beyond language, I understood something about survival that I'd known intellectually but had never felt quite so viscerally.

It was also during those hours—muscles screaming, storm raging—that a memory came roaring back.

I was not much older than my nephew when I first learned to canoe those northern waters. I met someone there. A young man who really knew what he was doing. He taught me to read the water, to respect the weather, to move through the wilderness rather than against it. But mostly, he taught me to relish the silence.

He was deaf. And it didn't matter.

I'd never met someone who could appreciate nature so completely—not despite his deafness, but perhaps because of it. He existed in a different relationship with the world than I did, one where listening wasn't about ears at all. We communicated in gestures, in shared attention, in the kind of understanding that builds when you stop relying on words to do all the work.

I fell for him. I know that now. I knew it then, too, somewhere inside—but I didn't have the language for it. The confidence. The courage.

I've wondered over the years what might have happened if I'd been braver. If the person I am now could have reached back and given that younger version of myself permission to speak what he felt. But that's a fool's errand, isn't it? Could have. Would have. The past doesn't work that way.

What remains is a memory that still holds warmth. A gratitude for what he taught me. And an awareness that he'd already learned things at our age that I was only beginning to glimpse—about resilience, about communication, about finding your way in a world that isn't always built for you.

Paddling through that storm with my nephew, I thought about him. About how he would have navigated those hours. How we would have communicated our way through the chaos without a single word.

And somewhere in those thoughts, a novel was born.

A Language of Water follows Danny, a young man I modeled loosely on my nephew—though I made Danny deaf. I did this not to create obstacles for him to overcome, but to explore something I've been thinking about for years: how difficult it is, at that age, to know how to speak. How much harder still to feel heard when it seems like no one is listening.

Danny's deafness isn't his story. It's part of who he is, shaping how he moves through a world that often fails to meet him where he stands. His journey into the wilderness with his uncle becomes a space where different rules apply—where silence isn't absence, and communication flows through channels that have nothing to do with sound.

His boyfriend, David, is there too—adding mischief to Danny's seriousness, the way my nephew would drop unexpected quips over campfire dinner prep that made me laugh out loud. Pure David, I'd think, watching my nephew grin at his own cleverness.

To anyone in the Deaf community reading this: I hope I've done justice to these characters. I approached them with respect, with research, and with the memory of a young man who showed me, decades ago, that language is far more nuanced than I'd understood. That being heard has very little to do with what's spoken.

That's what I wanted this novel to explore. The ways we reach each other across silence. The courage it takes to communicate what matters most. And the wilderness—both literal and internal—where we sometimes find the space to finally do it.

A Language of Water is available now.