ORIGIN STORY
After 19 years sober, I’ve learned a few things.
It’s okay to be broken.
Healing takes time.
And even the ugliest days can lead to something beautiful if you keep showing up.
That’s what all of this is about.
What you’ll find here was written over the last four years—sometimes when I felt ten feet tall, other times when I felt invisible. These essays and stories began as a kind of personal therapy, but over time, they became something bigger. They became my way of trying to help others from the pain that I felt, to help them from lives of quiet desperation to ones of deafening inspiration.
In 2017, I co-founded Sober & Stoked, with one of my best friends, Scott French, a project and documentary built around action sports athletes in recovery. That work helped me see that storytelling—real, raw, human storytelling—can reach people in a way that advice never could. That same idea became the seed for The Director’s Cut, a way of looking at life as a film, with each of us in the leading role.
Somewhere along the way, I didn’t want to craft some perfect brand.
I just wanted to write.
The Director's Cut and all the essays and writings in the Undercurrent, started under my real name (spoiler alert, Eugene Owens is my pen name) because I wanted to keep it separate from my fiction. Like so many things, I was trying to craft perfection before I had gotten started.
Elaborate roadmaps have been my M.O. for the last 15 years or so, sketching out the blueprint to things on whiteboards as big as a wall, expecting that if I had it all planned out in advance, I could somehow escape the bumps and bruises along the way.
Then, somewhere along the way, I realized that messy was fine and that I didn’t need to cultivate an image for anyone to like me. So, I scrapped the whole motivational speaker thing and decided to just do one thing for the first time in my life. I realized that it was important that you knew something about me so that you knew something about my characters.
That’s when Eugene Owens was born.
Using a pen name is interesting, and everyone does it for a different reason.
Say the name Stiltner.
Now forget the l in the middle.
Stitner.
Now put the l back in and drop the second t.
Stilner.
The decades-long massacre of my last name made me realize that if I wanted to be a writer that people could tell their friends about, they had to be able to pronounce the name.
Plus, my son’s name is Owen, so it felt pretty perfect.
FROM THERAPY TO FICTION
The fiction on this site is the other half of the story.
My debut series follows Detective Marc McKinley in a coastal town called East Bay, which is built from pieces of every beach town I’ve ever lived in or surfed in—from New Hampshire to Miami, and most notably Ocean City, MD, where I spent nearly two decades. After leaving that world behind, I now live in St. Augustine, FL with my wife, our two kids, and a grom-like desire to get in the water everyday.
Like many of you, I grew up on The Hardy Boys and later found authors like Craig Johnson, C.J. Box, Randy Wayne White, Carl Hiassen, and Jeffrey Deaver. My writing pulls from all of those places, plus 17 years spent in the restaurant and nightclub scene, which gave me a lifetime's worth of inspiration for my writing.
Whether it’s Marc McKinley, Van Baker, Carter Black, Monty Frost, or whoever else I dream up, they’re all fragments of lived experience. Their stories are shaped by recovery, fatherhood, failure, addiction, hope, and the deep pull of the ocean.
They aren’t real.
But they’re all true.
From the bottom of my heart, thanks for coming along for the ride.
—Eugene "Stiltner" Owens
