Deep in the South Pacific, where they warn sailors not to go, Magdalena Louise Hirt, with her husband and four children, venture to move their boat from Bora Bora to New Zealand.
The adventure is coming this November!
Distant Story Blue takes readers along this journey with poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, interwoven, stretched, and pulled like the lines of a taunt sail. You will experience gentle nights of calm awe and terrifying nights of near-death. Her fiction will only give you escape from this into mythical history or a post-apocalyptic future. Magdalena's non-fiction will take you through the all-to-familiar life of a mom but squeezed into 49 feet with no escape. She will share her journals, and her moments on night shift alone in the dark in the middle of nowhere. Her prose will push you to the limits of sanity as the waves and wind build, and they must seek sanctuary at Beveridge Reef, a coral atoll impossible to spot with the naked eye due to there being no land. After surviving the South Pacific, take refuge in her poetry and prose via her sailboat and campervan, as she explores all of North and South Island, New Zealand.
About Magdalena Louise Hirt
Poetry saved Magdalena Louise Hirt's life. After suffering rape at the age of sixteen, she downward spiraled into a life of drugs and dangerous activities. It wasn't till her college sophomore year that she took a class with poet Jack Ridl and found a room full of students who would listen to her. It was this listening and bearing witness that made Magdalena (Maggie) want to live again and live well—see it all.
By graduation, she had a van and traveled the States for two years. After earning her teaching certificate, teaching, getting married, having two children, and surviving the Great Recession of 2007-9, Nick Hirt (her husband) and Maggie uprooted their lives and began again in a new city. After two more children and a master's degree, they began to get restless, when being involved in making their city better pushed back too hard. They bought a boat, a 49-ft Westerly, Selkie, and learned to open-water sail to make a better life for themselves and their children. What they did not know was how difficult it was to withstand the weather and pirates while homeschooling through seasickness. But this life was too good to let go. To wake up, look out a hatch, and see the sea or a remote island, to bear witness to pollution and global warming, to encounter all the cultures the world has to offer, was worth the low-lows to reach these high-highs.
Their family of six sails to circumnavigate the globe. So far, they have cruised, wintered, and been through lockdown in the Great Lakes of Michigan, Canada, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Azores, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, the circle of the Baltic Sea (Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Estonia, Russia, and Finland), the Netherlands, the Bay of Biscay, Spain, Canary Isles, Cape Verde, back to the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Panama, French Polynesia, the Kingdom of Tonga, New Zealand, and soon-to-be Fiji and Australia. These ports and crossings complete an Atlantic circumnavigation and a Pacific crossing.
Now, with a second master's degree and five published poetry books, Maggie writes like the hull of a boat slices and soars, to stay alive. Hold her sixth publication in your hands, Distant Story Blue, bear witness to the good and the bad, and help Maggie grow to write even more, through listening.
