Sam Clark

Sam Clark grew up in Poughkeepsie in the Quaker Community there. As a child, his family had a place on an island in Upper Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks. They lost the place later, but The Island still lives in much of what Sam builds, and certainly in The Inland Sea.

Sam came to Vermont in 1960 to attend the late lamented Woodstock Country School. After College at Amherst, he moved to Plainfield, Vermont. He has been a designer, builder, and cabinetmaker since 1970, working in Central Vermont and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sam has been involved in a series of worker-owned woodworking businesses (co-ops) in both locations. His partners and he were part of a sea-change in building, the rise of owner-builders and of “design-build”. The idea that the person who builds or remodels a house could be the designer, in collaboration with the homeowner, is common now, but back in the 60s and 70s, it was a radical idea.

He has written several books on design and building, including The Motion-minded Kitchen, and The Independent Builder, which are still found on the shelves of older builders, and some younger ones.

Since the mid 1980s his focus has been in ergonomics and how it applies to kitchen design and accessible building.

Sam has always been interested in the history and people of New England, and the ideas that took root here. He had often attempted to write about this subject with little success. But on November 4, 2008, the day Barack Obama was elected, he was hit by a car while biking, not far from his home in Plainfield. He couldn’t work for a few months, but he could still type. He decided to approach this subject again in the form of a mystery novel.

During this period, he had gotten back into boating, and his family had a spot, with a dock, in a trailer park called Montani's, in Keeler Bay, on the eastern side of South Hero Island, in Lake Champlain. This sequestered part of the lake is known as the Inland Sea. It seemed natural to locate his story there.

Sam says, “it might seem absurd to jump from writing building books to writing a novel, but to me principles to live by, and principles to build by, aren't that different. You could argue that constructing a detective story isn't entirely different from constructing a building book, or a house.”