Matt Bondurant teaches writing at UTD. He’s also a novelist of some note. The movie Lawless was based on a novel he wrote called The Wettest County in the World, which he based on his family’s history of running moonshine. Let’s see. What else do you need to know about Matt? He has a very attractive wife. He oftentimes doesn’t respond to kind invitations to go have a beer. Oh! And he’s a competitive long-distance, open-ocean swimmer. That last detail is an important one.
Matt has a story in the July issue of Outside magazine. You should read it. Here’s the lead:
At first, the jellyfish were easy to negotiate. I swam through them, maneuvering like the Millennium Falcon in an underwater asteroid belt. Other swimmers occasionally came up for air, talking and laughing, and at one point I saw our coach, Ned Denison, holding a jelly in the palm of his immense hand, pretending to eat it. Then we hit the wall, and there was nowhere to go but through it. That’s when people started screaming.
