Colin Clancy wrote the first draft of his debut novel “Ski Bum” while attending Northern Michigan University. The book is about a college dropout named Jimmy who moves to Colorado to chase the ski bum lifestyle, often working at resorts and doing menial labor to devote as much time as possible to his favorite activity. Jimmy tries to chase the Rocky Mountain high by shredding down Silver Mountain, while engaging in a “spontaneous party life of hot-tub poaching, illicit sledding, and living scrappy and poor in a place where rich people vacation.”
Unlike the book's main character, Clancy was not a college dropout. He holds two degrees: a master's in English that he earned from NMU in 2010; and a bachelor's in English from Western Michigan University. Much like the protagonist of his book, though, Clancy has had a love for skiing for as long as he could remember.
“I grew up in the Kalamazoo area and our ski club would take us all out to the Bittersweet Ski Resort,” he said during an interview. “I just really enjoyed the freedom of being dropped off at the ski hill as a kid with my friends and just being able to ski and have fun all the way until it was closing time and we had to go home. In high school, my best friend's parents had a cottage at Crystal Mountain, and we would spend a lot of weekends there. He and I had always talked about taking a winter semester off our junior year of college to go out to Colorado and do the ski bum thing. So, we did that and landed in Copper Mountain.”
Copper Mountain inspired the setting of Ski Bum. When asked about how much of himself he put into the main character, Clancy said that calling it semi-autobiographical would be false, even though the emotions and settings are based in reality.
“One of the major themes of the book is sort of the feeling of being outdoors and appreciating the beauty of nature, communing with nature,” Clancy said. “I also tried to make Silver Mountain and the feelings of skiing as realistic as possible.”
Ski Bum had been a work in progress for years before it was published. Clancy wrote the first few lines while working at the Copper Mountain Ski Resort back in 2005.
“It was really my time at Northern that made me sit down and realize that I was writing a novel,” Clancy said. “I finished my first draft there, but then I put it in a drawer for the next several years. Then, I would take it out and do another draft before putting it back away. A couple of years ago, I decided that it was time to either polish it and publish the book, or start something new. So, I opened up a new Word document and kind of started from scratch, while taking the things that I liked from previous drafts and molding it into what you see today.”
Clancy plans to continue writing, whether that be articles for “The Ski Journal” or “The Flyfish Journal,” or even a new novel. In the meantime, he's been writing and illustrating a children's book dedicated to his 2-year-old son.
“It's about a young jackalope in the wild who hears that jackalopes aren't real, so he goes on a little journey to find out what he really is,” Clancy says. “The artwork is going to be a lot of pen and ink, with mountainous landscapes and images of wildlife, and my hope is that some of these illustrations, as well as the story, might help to inspire kids to go and enjoy the outside.”
Clancy and his family—wife, Amy, two sons and two dogs—live in the mountains of Utah. To learn more about him and his published work, visit https://colinclancy.net/.