“I began to imagine, ‘What if I actually did this crazy thing?'” Hohn said. Once Hohn received a map of the bath toys’ route from oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer in Seattle, the book began to take shape. It seemed too good to be true,” Hohn said. “I didn’t realize there were container spills, and there was charm in the story. He had read a news article reporting on the arrival of the toys on New England beaches. Hohn first learned about the bath toy spill in the spring of 2005. It gave me another year to work on my book.” “In a state of financial anxiety, I got this magical phone call from the foundation. “My book advance was all gone,” Hohn said. While working on “Moby-Duck,” Hohn received the Whiting Writer’s Award in 2008 for non-fiction. “The internship for me was as important as any schooling that I had it’s what introduced me to journalism and narrative non-fiction,” Hohn said. He moved to New York City for his girlfriend, now wife, Beth Chimera, and began an internship at Harper’s Magazine, around the corner from where he tended bar. My spring semester, I wrote 70 pages about 20th-century poetry for the fun of it,” Hohn said.Īfter graduate school at Boston University, Hohn set out to write fiction. Hohn completed an independent study project with his AP English teacher, Maryanne Lyons, when he returned for his senior year. I wrote for The Review and edited the literary magazine,” Hohn said. “I was very bookish in middle school writing became a serious ambition during my sophomore year.
Hohn’s first book was the culmination of years spent devoted to writing. Published in 2011, “Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them,” recounts author Donovan Hohn’s (’90) travels around the globe in pursuit of the elusive plastic duck. Wanted: not the white whale Moby-Dick but the yellow plastic Moby-Duck.Įver since 12 cargo containers fell overboard during a storm in the Pacific Ocean in 1992, thousands of rubber ducks have been traveling in the largest bathtub of all–the ocean. Note: This article was originally published in the November 2012 print issue.
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