Emerson Brookes writes clean, later-in-life romance set on the coast of Maine, where the banter is witty and the women are old enough to know exactly what they want.
Emerson is the pen name of Darrell Van Wagner, who spent years writing self-help under the name Jack Wolf. The books were genuinely useful, by most accounts, but somewhere along the way, he started missing story: the characters, the banter, the slow unraveling of somebody's better self through plot instead of principles. Self-help could tell people how to change. Fiction could show them.
So he pivoted, on the theory that he could still walk readers through struggle and transformation, just with funnier dialogue and a page-turning plot. His first novel, What Remains of Claire Bennett, never saw daylight. It needed work. It still does. But it introduced him to the fictional town of Birch Point, and he never quite left.
Darrell lives with his wife, three sons, and seven chickens, none of whom take credit for the quiet porch scenes in his books, since they never seems to happen at home.
