Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they would like. This week, Spencer Fleury writes about The Shitbird from Stanchion.

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Much like Colin McAllister, the narrator of my new novel The Shitbird, I arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts on a raw gray day in October of 1993 to begin my first assignment as a lowly seaman apprentice in the U.S. Coast Guard, at the very bottom of the pecking order aboard a 270-foot cutter. Even though I remembered the sequence of events that had brought me there—a visit to the recruiter’s office, signing the paperwork, going through basic training—I still didn’t feel I understood quite how it had happened. I was fairly certain I didn’t belong there, and deeply apprehensive about what awaited me on the other side of the ship’s gangway.

I joined the Coast Guard for what some people might say were all the wrong reasons: I had a newly-minted bachelor’s degree but no money; the job market was, according to Tom Brokaw, the worst for graduating college seniors since World War II; and my parents (by which I mean, mostly my father) refused to let me live at home until I could get a little organized and figure things out. A couple of people had mentioned the Coast Guard as a potentially interesting diversion for a young man with no family responsibilities. So I let myself drift into it.

McAllister’s ship, the Stargazer, is closely modeled on my own ship, the Campbell. It’s one of thirteen Famous-class cutters, all of which are still in service. I lived on that boat for the first year I was assigned to it, in accordance with ship’s policy for junior enlisted personnel. Once I was allowed to live on the nearby base, I still spent more time on the boat than I did at home. It was just that kind of job.

When, years later, I finally decided to sit down and write the novel I’d been thinking about for so long, one that had its roots in my own Coast Guard experience, I naturally decided to set it on a ship much like the Campbell, and in the same era that I’d served. The story itself is definitely fiction, but the scenes and anecdotes and characters I wanted to write about all sprouted from my time on that boat.

It certainly helped that I’d spent two full years of my life immersed in that environment, even if it was 30 years ago. I still knew the ship’s layout, what the compartments looked like, how the routine functioned. Well, okay, I kind of still remembered all that stuff—it doesn’t ever really leave you, but it does go dormant. Nevertheless, I felt confident I could write a detailed and accurate depiction of life aboard a 270 back in the early ‘90s without needing to do much, if any, outside research. So I got started.

From the earliest stages of the writing process, it felt crucial that I capture the shipboard environment as accurately as possible. I’m not sure why; I’d written enough fiction by then to know that there were more important structural questions to focus on, especially at that stage. Maybe it was because there’s so little fiction (that I’m aware of, anyway) written about the Coast Guard, and I wanted to set the bar as high as I could. Maybe it’s because the novel’s connection to my own experiences and to people I once knew well felt like an obligation—to those people, to the service itself, to myself—to portray it all as straight as possible.

Besides, I knew there are readers who would judge the novel almost solely on those details. You know who I mean—the WELL ACKSHULLY type who wants to show how much more he knows about the subject than the author does. Perhaps you’ve been one of these readers yourself at some point. I know I have.

And you know, sometimes those readers have a point. It’s not unreasonable to wonder if an author who plays a bit loose with details might take the same approach to other aspects of their work. Spending time on the fit and finish of a project—whether it’s a book or some stately wooden shelves to put it on—is what you have to do if you are hoping to create something that is worthwhile, something to be taken seriously. Accurate details are a part of that, whether the reader knows they’re accurate or not.

So I began the process of remembering as much as I could, starting with the most basic things.

But it wasn’t as easy as I’d been expecting. When I tried to mentally walk the decks from the fantail to the fo’c’sle, I found myself getting turned around. I couldn’t quite remember how to get to Officer’s Country, where all the officers’ staterooms were. How did avionics connect to the deck below it? Where, exactly, was the armory? I couldn’t see it. I’d have to do some research after all.

Fortunately, by then there was plenty of information out there. You might be able to find some simple, non-classified diagrams of the interiors of these ships, though I couldn’t turn any up the last time I looked online. There’s a documentary about the cutter Mohawk, the thirteenth Famous-class cutter, that was made in the late 1990s and is freely available online, with lots of footage of the ship’s interior spaces. And I found a small trove of photographs I’d taken during my time on the Campbell.

These photos don’t have a lot to say about the layout of the ship’s interior. They’re mostly of my shipmates and me, either during operations or just screwing around during the downtime. There are some of a freighter that was on fire when we found it; these helped a lot for getting the blocking and tackling right in one of the climactic scenes near the end of the book, when McAllister decides to get the jump on his nemesis. But they were still incredibly useful to me, because they helped me draw from the emotional experience of those two years: what it felt like to be on that ship, to be a part of that crew, to see the things we saw and to live with and know those people the way I did.

That’s where the roots of the story are. The narrative itself needed to carry some kind of core human truth, and I could only really get to that by better accessing the reality of my own lived experience aboard the Campbell. Correctly depicting the layout of the main deck of a Coast Guard cutter doesn’t really bring the reader any closer to that truth. Where the ship’s office is and whether there was a statue of a dog mounted to the bulkhead in the mess deck are details that have no bearing on the oppressive hierarchical structures of both the military itself and of unhealthy masculinity generally. I could put those things wherever I wanted to and nothing important about the book would change.

As I mentioned before, even though I drew extensively on my personal experiences to write this book, The Shitbird is still fiction. It’s not a secret memoir with a thin veneer of plausible deniability brushed over it. Colin McAllister and I are not the same person. But the only way to tell his story was to dig back into my own, to invest time and energy into investigating who I was back then, examining my feelings about that time in my life with as much objectivity as I could manage, and then using that understanding to build from scratch a character who, when placed in a similar situation, would do all sorts of things I wouldn’t have.

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Spencer Fleury is the author of I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories (Malarkey Books, 2024) and How I’m Spending My Afterlife (Woodhall Press, 2021). He lives in San Francisco and Portugal.