Writer with Valley ties is having a whale of a career

Writer with Valley ties is having a whale of a career
By JENNIFER D. SCHATZEL
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
It was 1973. Erich Hoyt was 22 years old and an aspiring musician and filmmaker in Vancouver, British Columbia, with scores for documentaries and even a feature film under his belt.
Then came the offer: a sound engineer's job on the first film expedition to search for and study killer whales off the coast of British Columbia.
It would change his life forever.
Three months of getting to know the whales led to four more years of research then to the publication of his first book, "Orca: The Whale Called Killer," (Dutton, 1981). (The Vindicator's books page July 26, 1981).
To his surprise, writing a book on orcas somehow made him a whale "expert," he says, and he received more offers: to work for National Geographic; to write another book; to consult on a major motion picture ("Free Willy" by Warner Brothers, 1993).
Along the way, he discovered that what was meant to have been a break in his music and film career was leading him in a different direction. He was not only well on his way to becoming a "whale nut/researcher and conservationist," but also a writer -- though he had much to learn.
Born to succeed
But, there never should have been any doubt that whatever Hoyt put his energy into he ultimately would achieve:
U At 16, he taught himself to play the guitar and autoharp (he would move on to the bass, harmonica, piano and electronic synthesizer).
U Shortly before his 18th birthday, he left home to help found a progressive school in Toronto, Canada, only to drop out to launch his music and film career in a little cottage on the beach off Vancouver Island. He also took and developed his own photographs, which he sold to galleries.
U At 19, with $600 in savings, he started his own music/record store in Victoria, which he then sold to "go back to the land" for three years on an 8-acre farm in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia. He continued his music and was writing.
It may very well be genetic.
His mother, Betty Shutrump Hoyt, who was born and still lives in Youngstown, is a former journalist and editor. She worked for Shutrump & amp; Associates, Wedgewood Apartments and for Fred Shutrump Jr., and although now retired continues to do free-lance public relations work.
His father, Robert Emmet Hoyt, a native of Springfield, Ohio, had a long career as newspaper editor, writer and TV producer, including stints at The Akron Beacon Journal, Knight Newspapers (now Knight Ridder) and as a Washington correspondent in the 1950s and '60s and a TV producer for CBC in Canada and PBS in New York and Washington. He also edited and contributed to many other papers, including The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, where he wrote a weekly political column until his death in April 2000.
Both are graduates of Kent State University, where they met.
A little catching up
Today, Hoyt is considered one of the world's leading authorities on whales and dolphins, and has 13 books to his credit: the last, "Creatures of the Deep: In Search of the Sea's 'Monsters' and the World They Live In" (Firefly) was published in 2001.
The Vindicator got the chance to catch-up with him about the book, his career and his life albeit via email since he now lives in North Berwick, Scotland, with his wife and their four children.
What follows is only a smattering of what he had to say on a variety of topics:
Love for the sea
I suppose it was our annual extended-family trips to Atlantic City, led by my grandparents [the late Fred and Helen Shutrump of Youngstown] that started me loving the ocean. I remember when that magical smell of the saltwater would hit us just after going through the New Jersey Pine Barrens as we neared the coast. I never liked being land-locked when I was a kid, so when I left home I headed for the west coast of Canada, and since then I have rarely been farther than a couple miles from the sea. I once calculated that with all my orca and whale watching trips, that I have spent the equivalent of about 18 months living on boats at sea.
His academic training
It's self-taught. I used to be apologetic about it but now I'm writing scientific papers and encyclopedia entries, directing a scientific project and acting as a scientific adviser for the U.K. and German governments, so I just shrug and don't worry about it. When I was first interested in whales in the early 1970s there were no courses at university on this, anyway. The best course was the "university of the sea" and that's where I learned. The orcas taught me a lot.
'Creatures'
I always look for new challenges. That's why my work on social behavior of whales led also to social behavior of ants and other insects in the rainforest. It's not always a logical progression, but out on all those long journeys at sea searching for whales I was curious about the squid and octopus and strange fish we would encounter. So I started collecting material for the book. It happened over four to five years. "Creatures of the Deep" was originally envisioned as a much shorter, smaller kids books and it sort of grew into the big book it became. Like most things I do, it seems to get a bit out of hand.
Most fascinating creature(s)
I love the look and name of the comb jelly or sea walnut: the bloody belly ctenophore (p. 45), which was a coup getting it for the book as it was just described last year (a few months before the book went to press). It looks a bit like an Atlantic City version of a sea monster, all lit up with its gorgeous bioluminescence. The vampire squid is so haunting and mysterious and although they've been know for years as this bizarre creature somewhere between an octopus and a squid, I'd never seen a photo of them until I found this one for the book (it's also on the back cover).
Writing for children
I've actually had three books published for children and one more is written and being edited now for publication probably next spring. It's a challenge writing for children -- there are differences in terms of how deeply you can go into something, but mostly it's just another form out of many possible ways to write. I usually try to imagine one or more children that I'm writing for, and I test things out on my own kids
Mentors
My father was my mentor for many years, and gave lots of advice on writing and career -- lots of it considered and ignored, some of it life-changing. Other mentors for a time have been the scientist E.O. Wilson and the novelist John Fowles ("French Lieutenant's Woman." etc.).
Career update
I'm starting to think about my next book and new directions, but I never talk about it until it's well on the way. It's a way of keeping energy for something strong inside me, and keeping the ideas circulating. If you tell someone, it goes out of you.
But my other work also continues full steam. This is the U.N. Year of Ecotourism, and I have been contributing to the U.K. and German government's initiatives in this area. I love analyzing project needs in conservation and dreaming up ways of solving some of the problems. It draws on my experience with whale watching, which I have helped to set up in various countries and have charted the growth worldwide in various papers and reports. Between 1995 and 2000, I was on the steering committee for a series of scientific workshops that laid out all the dimensions of the problems with whale and dolphin watching worldwide and then try to solve them.
The other part of my work is as co-director of the Far East Russia Orca Project, a project I dreamed in 1999 when I was in Hokkaido, Japan, speaking at a conference. A Japanese collaborator I have worked with for years was there and we met up with a Russian scientist and traveled for a week after the conference up to the Kuril Islands, which are disputed by Russia and Japan. We got along well and hatched this idea to study orcas. It was job largely to raise the funds and get it launched. This summer we'll be our fourth and every year the study has expanded. Over the past two weeks I wrote three abstracts for scientific papers on our work in Kamchatka on orcas, which will be presented at an international conference next September in Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, Siberia.
Rewards of work
I suppose the truth is that I like the variety. Also: There are aspects of everything that I do that are just plain hard work, a grind, but once you drive through that wall of work and achieve real depth with whatever subject you're grappling with, then there is the wonderful moment of understanding. When this is a creative work, a piece of writing, I supposed that's the ultimate for me. But the amount of effort it takes to get to that point always amazes me.
Other highly rewarding moments: Every book is like a child who grows up and takes on a life of her own. The big reward comes when that book gets a great review, wins a prize, gets translated or comes out in a great new edition, or, perhaps most of all, when someone writes or comes up to me in public and tells me how one of my books intrigued or moved them or even changed their life.
Memories of Youngstown
My most recent visit was in summer 2000, I was Thurber Writer in Residence at the James Thurber House in Columbus for the summer. Partly I had entered the competition to try to get the residency because I wanted to come back and visit. My wife, Sarah, and our four kids came over, too, to meet their cousins and spent time in Youngstown and in Canton. We had a lot of good times, family get-togethers with my mother, my sisters and their children, and my aunts, uncles and cousins
Growing up and even now, I loved Mill Creek Park, spent a lot of time exploring. Even when I lived in Akron -- and I also grew up in northern Virginia, Cambridge, Mass., Grosse Pointe, Mich., and Toronto, Ontario -- we were always coming to visit my many cousins, aunts and uncles and my grandparents in Youngstown. ... I spent summers exploring the park when I was 8 and 9 as my grandparents lived on the edge of it. I collected crayfish and frogs and found some great tunnels and paths. But I also liked playing baseball. I worked for my uncles for a summer in Youngstown at age 16, and there were opportunities offered, but I knew that I wanted to do something different. I don't know where it came from, but I have always wanted to do something different and be a pioneer with things, ideas, projects, to create or do something new. That's a driving force with me.
XFor more about Erich Hoyt visit www.fireflybooks.com/Nature/HOYT.html.