With Deepest Sorrow

It is with deepest sorrow that I post here that my dear friend and fellow writer Mark S. Williams, author of the memoir F/V Black Sheep, passed away early this morning. Mark was 56 years old and had been a Gloucester fisherman most of his adult life.

I met Mark in May of 2004 when he hired me to edit the manuscript for his collection of stories about his life as a lobsterman. For over three years we worked on that book, spending time together nearly every day and, during that time, we became quite close. I loved Mark dearly. He could be exasperating and annoying and obnoxious and hard to get along with but he was also one of the sweetest and most sensitive people I ever knew. He loved Gloucester and he loved writing about Gloucester. He was keenly attuned to nature and could tell you the name of every bird and fish and creature that he saw.

When his book F/V Black Sheep was published in June 2006 he was happier than I could ever imagine anyone being. He was so proud of that book that he would drive around Gloucester giving away copies of it and telling people, “Read it. If you like it you can pay me for it.” Most people did. He loved to call me and tell me about people stopping him in the street to tell him how much they enjoyed his stories.

Throughout the time we spent together we had plenty of creative differences. He was the author and I was the editor and, even when I completely disagreed with his approach I learned to respect him as a writer. His writing in F/V Black Sheep was alternately tender and intense, hilarious and frightening. I still think Little League is a masterful piece of writing and that Garand Afternoon is one of the strongest pieces of writing I have ever read anywhere by anyone.

I simply do not have words to say how bereft I feel. We spent hundreds of hours together. We talked about writing and about books and about life and about our respective dreams for all the books we intended to write after our current book. He was dearer to me than I have words to say. Now he has left the world and there is nothing more to be said.

His mother called me this morning and gave me the news. She said she wanted me to know because she knew how much I loved him. It is deeply gratifying to me that, even when we were not part of each others lives, there was still so much there.

So, Mark, I hope you are on the water somewhere under a sunny sky with a light swell in the ocean and traps full of lobsters. I hope you will remember all that we shared and I hope that you will continue to see your world through your poet’s eyes. And I will close this with the words from your book that I loved the most because they were the most like you: My house sits on a tidal marsh behind Good Harbor Beach. I work on my lobster traps there and watch hawks soar.

Fare thee well, my dear Mark.