Books & Essays
After over two decades practicing trial law, I began writing as a hobby. Naturally, I chose to write about a place I loved, a world apart, really, where my father was raised and where he took me at every opportunity—Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I’ve always loved these riverscapes and been intrigued by their culture and the people who inhabit them. As a result, all three of my books are connected to this place.
My two novels, The Waterman and Good Counsel are set in Talbot County, near Easton, Maryland, and Bloodsworth is the story of an Eastern Shore waterman who got swept away by a crime he didn’t commit. It’s been a joy to try and capture the rhythms of these rivers. I hope my readers will enjoy these books as much as I have enjoyed writing them. You can find them at your local bookstore, library, or online.
Bloodsworth
Charged with the rape and murder of nine-year-old girl in 1984, Kirk Bloodsworth was tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in Maryland’s gas chamber. Maintaining his innocence, he read everything he could on criminal justice, finally landing on a book in the prison library that mentioned the new technology of DNA testing. Kirk convinces a lawyer to help him and after spending nine years in one of Maryland’s harshest prisons, he is freed. Kirk then goes to help identify the real murderer, and over time becomes a powerful spokesperson for civil justice.
The book reads like a mystery—how Maryland’s finest and most experienced detectives and prosecutors, well-meaning but hell-bent on solving this heinous crime, could get it so wrong. The story weaves its way through their investigation, from their perspective, and provides the reader with a real sense of how easy it is for the wheels of criminal justice to run off the track.
Awards
Maryland Humanities “One Maryland One Book,” 2018
Atlanta Journal Constitution: Best Non-Fiction, 2004
Christian Science Monitor: Noteworthy Non-Fiction, 2004
The Waterman
The Waterman is the story of Clay Wakeman, born and raised on the Chesapeake. When his father is lost in a storm, Clay drops out of college and takes possession of his father’s boat to pursue the independent life of a waterman. Clay recruits his old friend Byron, home from Vietnam, to help him. From then on, Clay must rely on his sense of the water—through the twists and turns of the weather, the unpredictability of his tormented partner, the guilt of a forbidden love, and the very bad luck of pulling up from the water more than just crabs and eelgrass. For just as Clay and Byron are beginning to make a living, Hurricane Agnes roars in and puts an end to crabbing in the upper Bay, forcing them to crab south in Virginia waters. It’s in those unfamiliar waters that their troubles really begin: Clay falls irrevocably in love with the spoken for Kate; Byron’s post-traumatic stress kicks in with vengeance; and out on the Bay, the partners stumble onto a drug ring. In a riveting boat chase, Clay comes close to losing everything.
In The Waterman, souls are on the line—the soul of the mighty Bay, its way of life as fragile as its ecology, and the soul of an appealing young hero.
Award
Maryland State Arts Council: Individual Artist Award in Fiction, 2000
Good Counsel
Jack Staunton has escaped from DC and is hiding out on Maryland’s eastern shore, trying to evade capture by the U.S. Marshall service. While in hiding he re-lives a career that started in such a promising fashion, trying to fathom what went wrong, how a young idealistic and talented lawyer could have so lost his way on the slippery slope of trying to help his clients. In many ways the book explores how what we do changes us, just as the dyer’s hands over time become like the blues and reds of the coloring agents in the vat. When Jack makes a last ditch effort to escape, he is aided by a young woman who is herself in harm’s way, and who provides Jack with a last chance to regain some remnant of his honor and his soul.
Select Essays
Jeff Horstman: Prince of the Wye
by Tim Junkin
Chesapeake Bay Magazine, 2021
Jeff Horstman was nine years old in 1968, living on a New Jersey beach, when his mother, Nina, adopted an abandoned seal pup. Coaxing it to drink mackerel pureé from a baby bottle, they raised it to become a 200-pound adult, teaching it obedience skills and tricks. Through a doggy door, the seal had free run of their house. It would come and go as it pleased, take off in the ocean to catch fish, swim alongside Jeff when he was surfing, and then waddle and hump its way onto their plastic covered couch, barking for attention and treats. Soon they adopted a second seal to keep it company.
Word spread about the expertise of this family of seal trainers and National Geographic published a profile. The following year the family welcomed the opportunity to move onto a research ship based in Marathon Key, Florida, studying marine mammals and teaching them essential underwater tasks. Jeff lived on the ship for four years with no formal schooling. Dress code: cutoffs and a tee shirt. What he did learn was to free dive and SCUBA, spearfish and pilot, and to navigate the vicissitudes of island life.
Speaking Science to Power
by Tim Junkin
Chesapeake Bay Magazine, 2020
Through hurricanes, politicians, and other natural disasters, scientist Don Boesch searches for solutions.
Don Boesch grew up in the 9th Ward of New Orleans, blocks from the Mississippi River. He experienced flooding from Hurricane Betsy in 1965, long before Hurricane Katrina engulfed the neighborhood. His father, who never graduated high school, let him tag along on fishing trips, stoking a fascination with the creatures of the estuary. Carapace collections and fiddler crabs in jars of alcohol decorated Don’s boyhood room. Inspired by his tenth-grade biology teacher, Don remembers doodling sketches of the marine laboratory he dreamed of building one day. What he probably couldn’t have imagined back then was that eventually he would build and lead not one but two internationally acclaimed marine research centers; that for over 27 years he would serve as the scientific advisor on the Chesapeake Bay Cabinet under five different Maryland governors; that he would advise two U.S. Presidents on issues such as climate change and the Deepwater Horizon BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill; that he would chair the Scientific and Technical Committee of Maryland’s first Commission on Climate Change, which would lead to the state’s first Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act (passed in 2009); and that he would become an ardent champion and leading voice for the concept of integrating and applying science to policy.
Druid of the Chesapeake
by Tim Junkin
Chesapeake Bay Magazine, 2019
Hope springs eternal in the persistence of Nick Carter.
Walking with Nick Carter through his thirty-three acres of greenwood boughs and shimmering leaves, a bog fed by a vernal spring, all set on the upper reaches of the Choptank River, is to experience a burgeoning forest through the eyes of its steward. One who also happens to be a legendary naturalist, a champion for the Bay, salty to the bone, irreverent, funny, and always unflinchingly honest.