About Emerson Brookes

Emerson Brookes is my pen name for romantic comedy. My real name is Darrell Van Wagner.

Short Story:

• Born on Thanksgiving. One more thing his parents had to be thankful for.
• Early morning person. Gym before writing.
• Most of the actual writing happens in the hot tub.
• Home life: wife, three sons, and seven chickens (outdoors, of course).
• Wrote self-help under a different pen name before switching to fiction.
• Emerson Brookes became "a real person" somewhere around Book One, draft three.

Long Story, Longer:

I was born on Thanksgiving, giving my parents one more thing to be thankful for, whether they wanted it or not. As the youngest in the family, I learned early that survival meant fighting for the last dinner roll, being loud enough to get noticed, and being happy with whatever hand-me-down I could get. None of these skills have fully left me.

I was a deeply introverted, shy kid, which meant fantasy adventure novels did most of my socializing for me. In college, I graduated to Star Wars novels, which had the added benefit of keeping most girls at a safe distance and me largely out of trouble. Mostly.

My resume before "author" reads like a dare: fast food, construction, a string of businesses launched out of sheer necessity to survive college and the broke early years of marriage, and eventually technical sales and engineering. Somewhere in there, I also became the volunteer pastor of a small New England church, because apparently a full-time job and a growing family didn't suck up enough free time.

Fiction had always been where I went to escape the pressure, the busyness, and the aggressively mundane. Writing, on the other hand, started somewhere else entirely: self-help. Under the pen name Jack Wolf, I wrote books meant to be genuinely useful, and by most accounts, they were. Readers left glowing reviews. Some said the material changed their lives. But somewhere along the way, I started missing telling stories. 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, I did what any reasonable person would do. I pivoted to fiction, where I could fill my pages with funny dialogue and page-turning plots. My first novel What Remains of Claire Bennett never saw daylight. It needed work. A lot of it. It still sits on a shelf somewhere, quietly judging me. But it introduced me to the town of Birch Point, the place I have fallen in love with.

I never gave up or put the dream away. If anything, I leaned in harder, researching the genre, studying pacing and depth in a way self-help had never demanded of me. I got caught up in a love triangle between clean, later-in-life romance and sharp, witty comedy. You know the kind, where the stakes are high, the location is charming, and nobody is tearing each other's clothes off on the page, doing naughty things.

That is where The Heart of Birch Point was born. It is the first book in the Birch Point Inn Series, and the pen name Emerson Brookes became a real person after draft three and before my fourth cup of coffee.

Ellen's happy place: iPad and wine in the hot tub.

Enlarge Photo

These days, I often write in the hot tub, with coastal Maine taking shape one soggy scene at a time. I love getting up way before the sun. I put my headphones in and listen to how-to videos and courses as I work out at the gym. Then I come home and start writing before the rest of the house is awake. I live with my wife, three sons, and seven chickens. The quiet scenes in my books that take place with rocking chairs on the front porch? Those are pure fiction, and never seem to actually pan out at home.