Kimbra Cutlip

Freelance Feature Writer

In The News
This article first appeared in the Bay Weekly
http://www.bayweekly.com/year99/issue7_49/dock7_49.html

Bay Life: Kimbra Cutlip
Local Sailor Writes a Tale for Chesapeake Country

Writer, editor and sailor Kimbra Cutlip of Galesville - whose book Sailor's Night Before Christmas is featured in this week's "Not Just for Kids" - has combined her life's loves to write a holiday tale for Chesapeake Country.

As a child, Cutlip felt words course through her veins. "I've always wanted to write," Cutlip says. "One of my earliest childhood memories is waking up in the middle of the night to write a poem."

Her own daughter, Sienna, 2, gave Cutlip's words purpose.

Not that Cutlip didn't have plenty of by-lines to her credit. One of her college degrees is in magazine journalism, but stints in the Peace Corps and fascination with underwater archaeology distracted Cutlip until 1996, when she published her first piece, "Christmas on Board," in New Bay Times. Cutlip later became associate editor for Weatherwise magazine, published in Washington, D.C.

Most of those years, Cutlip lived on a sailboat. "I came back from the Sahara Desert. I'd been on the biggest beach in the world. Now, I needed some water," Cutlip says. She'd been planning to make a leap with a friend, but when he backed out, she didn't. "I'd see people sitting in their cockpits. It was calm and attractive to me but it wasn't a focused goal. It's something that got into me," she says.

On board next door, Cutlip found her husband.

The first night she lived aboard, the dock master knocked on her hatch, asking for the captain. She introduced herself, admitting she was a captain who didn't know the first thing about a boat. Dock master Michael Broglie became first her teacher, then her husband.

"Whenever you are in a relationship you lose a little bit of yourself and that is scary. I was always a me and then I became a we. I couldn't be married to anyone but Michael. He never has taken away from who I am. He makes me better at who I want to be," says the now-expert sailor.

Soon a third sailor came along, and they named her Sienna.

It's she, who spent her first months living aboard, who inspired her mother to write her first book. 'How does Santa board a sailboat?' friends demanded. Cutlip responded with this story for Sienna and waterbabies like her.

The book, with watercolor pictures by renowned children's illustrator James Rice, rewords Clement C. Moore's 19th century The Night Before Christmas to the terms of life aboard.

Twar the night a'fore Christmas on Fisherman's Bay

And the wind she war calm, like she had been all day.

The sails they war stowed an' the sea war like glass,

But the red sky that morn' told me it wouldn't last

Despite troubled weather, Santa makes his appearance on a tugboat led by creatures with such names as Trawler, Matey and Skipper.

Thar, like a whale comin' full to the breech,

I saw the sea break an' I 'erd the wind screech.

As a wave crashed down on us, I squinted to see,

Eight giant seahorses haul a tug from the sea.

Cutlip's book, published in hard cover by Pelican Publishing Company, is part of a series of Nights rewritten for our times. Inspired by Cowboy Night Before Christmas, her book joins Cajun Night Before Christmas and, also this year, Trucker's Night Before Christmas.

When Cutlip heard Cowboy Night Before Christmas, her first thoughts were characteristic. "I can do that," she thought. That's the kind of derring-do that took her to Africa with the Peace Corps, to life on a boat she didn't know how to sail and across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express.

It's the kind of trust in blind faith or luck that provoked her to quit an enviable job with the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, training divers to read history under the water, to try her hand at writing.

"I saw that I was moving into security and salary. I was building this American life and moving away from the creative end. I was getting away from where I want to be.

"The scariest thing for me was to stop and decide I want to be a writer. If I did fail, I had the most to lose," Cutlip says.

Once again, good fortune fell in her lap. Not, of course, without confidence and willingness to work.

With Sienna and a sister or brother due in February, the family left the daily routine of boats behind. Now two-year-old Sienna reaps the benefits of sharing a house with her mother, who edits Weatherwise from home, and her father, who has to leave for work most days.

"Now that I'm in the kid mode, it's a good place to be. I hope there is a future there," Cutlip says about a present that - like so many of the places she found herself after stepping out on faith - she describes as "stumbling into gold."

I've lived a lot of different lives already. "There's something inside me now that tells me I could lose everything, and I'd find somewhere and some way to go on and be happy," says she.

-Mary Catherine Ball