NEIL STEBBINS
1970-2024
Oceanic Inspiration
“It will hit us hardest when our inboxes remain empty from Neil in the months and years to come. Many of us at Powder, ISki, and Surfer magazines had the honor of having Neil Stebbins as an editor, friend and writer of tremendous wit and depth, some for many decades.
We will deeply miss our erudite friend who sailed, surfed, and skied the world, piloted planes, test drove and reviewed speedy cars. Neil was a Renaissance man who read, wrote and lived life voraciously. His emails were a weekly, sometimes daily array of new ideas, artists, books, movies, blogs, travel journals and wonderful absurdities.” — Tina Cole
“Neil wrote close to the bone. Precision prose. His short stories are lessons in how to achieve maximum effect with the fewest words. He always found room for humor. That was his release valve, in a way. A quip over a tirade will do just fine to get the message across, thank you.
Words last when they impart insight. Neil’s gift to readers were his insights into the mysteries of the human condition and, in his book “Reading The Waves”, the magic of surfing.” — Kevin Naughton
“To be honest, if surfing teaches you anything it’s an unquenchable greed for waves tempered by the patience it takes to get them.”
From ROMANCE OF THE BOARD — “Reading The Waves”
BOOK PREVIEW
READING THE WAVES
Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.
But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.
