Steven Callahan

Since about age 10, when he helped his brothers build small barges out of roofing tar and old roofing boards to use on a pond, Steven Callahan has spent much of the his 60 years "messing about in boats." By age 12 was sailing out of sight of land. He taught himself the basics of boat design and celestial navigation, and helped build a 40 footer prior to graduating high school. As an adult, since 1974, he first built boats before turning to designing boats, teaching design, and writing about all aspects of the marine world. He's lived aboard for five years, raced offshore, captained boat deliveries, and sailed more than 80,000 offshore miles, most shorthanded and much on unusual craft. These experiences have inspired most of Callahan's creative work. He is particularly keen on exploring and helping to bring to the public the diversity, wonders, dangers, beauty, and sometimes horrors of the offshore wilderness and survival experiences, especially since his own survival voyage in 1982 when he lost his boat and spent two and a half months "learning to live like an aquatic caveman" while drifting about 2,000 miles across the Atlantic. He is probably best known for his New York Times best seller Adrift: Seventy Six Days Lost at Sea, which has also been adapted for stage, based on that event. Callahan uses his own and others' survival experiences to focus on the common stages of survival, the successful strategies survivors employ to adapt, and especially how challenges can ultimately serve as opportunities. Survival is the universal human issue, but how we meet it will vary widely. Callahan accepts that life will step on our toes, that we will not emerge without scars, but he also embraces the idea that we can learn to enhance our chances of survival and hopefully gain at least as much as we lose as we face its trials. We can all learn how to be better survivors, and in the process learn how best to face everyday problems. Since 1982, he has continued to voyage offshore, logging some 80,000 mostly trouble-free miles, although most of it has been shorthanded and in deep waters where "Murphy usually proves to be an optimist because not only what might go wrong usually does but even things that can't go wrong often go wrong." But despite the challenges of wilderness environments, Callahan is drawn to them, as he is to unusual and challenging voyages and projects of all sorts. He accepts that anything worth doing usually proves more difficult and time-consuming than one could ever imagine beforehand, but that "fun isn't all it is cracked up to be either," that nothing is the matter with fun but that true fulfillment trumps it and usually comes from doing or trying to do things a bit different or pushing the envelope. Since even before graduating university with degrees in psychology and philosophy, Callahan has always viewed boats, sailing, and the nuts and bolts of material life as the tools we use to link us with the conceptual, philosophical, even spiritual. He wrote in Adrift, "Some people go to church; I go to sea." and the core of the book explores man's relationship to nature, which he considers the real star of the show. In Callahan's eyes, venturing in the wilderness is good survival training, and the sea is the world's greatest wilderness. Such environments, Callahan believes, heighten and reveal elements of human character and society. His approach has helped Callahan's writings, talks, illustrations, and other work, even about the specialized world of boats and the sea, become embraced by a wider public. Adrift has been published in 16 languages, won the Salon du Libre Maritime in France, was chosen as a "best book of the 1980's" and "best book for young adults" by the American Library Association, and one of the best adventure books of all time by National Geographic Explorer. After 26 years, it remains in print and is currently being translated into Chinese. Callahan also authored Capsized, which chronicles the experience of four men trapped on an overturned, half-flooded trimaran off of New Zealand for four months in 1989, which has also been adapted for radio and stage as Flipside by Ken Duncum. He has contributed to a dozen other books as well, the majority on seamanship and survival, and spent four years at Cruising World magazine, a New York Times publication, where he served as senior editor. Callahan remains a frequent contributor to the yachting press worldwide, but has also written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, High Technology, International Wildlife and Ultrasport, among others. Callahan also has continued to interview survivors and survival experts, and to work as writer, consultant, equipment tester, and designer. Callahan's books and experiences have been widely featured in scores of media venues in more than a dozen countries, including Reader's Digest and People magazines, the Tonight and Today shows, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, Voice of America, and NPR's All Things Considered. He was the subject of a Heath Reading Video on ocean survival for primary school children, and an NHK (Japan's Public Broadcasting) television series on the human body. In the last few years, he's been profiled on numerous programs aired in the U.S. via the Discovery, History, and Biography Channels. Between 2009 and 2012, for the film adaptation of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi (2012), Academy-Award-winning director Ang Lee chose Callahan to serve many roles, from providing script input and consulting on numerous marine and survival issues, to designing and making props and testing and directing operations of an enormous wave tank, to, as Ang put it, "help us bring authenticity" to the film and "help us make the ocean into a major character" in all its diversity, rather than just a setting. Callahan could easily relate to Lee who he feels also constantly challenges himself and all around him to tackle new and interesting projects rather than remaking films that have been made before. He also shares the notion that how we frame life's often chaotic experiences is the way we make sense of them and give them meaning, a core theme of Life of Pi (2012). Thirty years ago, Callahan found a wife, editor, and best mate in Kathleen Massimini, a nurse, author, and editor originally from New Orleans who also ventured to Maine where she fell in love with it's dramatic coast and the sea. They met while she was building a wooden cutter in the 1970s, and have logged many miles together since 1983. Together they refit, lived aboard, and cruised a Carter 33 monohull, sailing her in 1990 to 1991 from Maine to the Caribbean, as well as a Cross 40 trimaran, Tryphena in Australia between 2002 and 2004. More recently, they also built a home together from scratch and although their travels have provided them with a feeling they have homes all over the world, their home of homes remain in Maine where wildlife is abundant and one can gaze at the stars at night.