Reviews of ZEN on Honolulu Star Advertiser

Carlsbad Magazine, July/August 2009

Carving Out a Life on Paper and on Waves by Tim Grenda


It's been 45 years, but Greg Gutierrez can still remember in vivid detail the precise moment he realized that he wanted to be a surfer.

It was 1964. Gutierrez was 5, and his family had traveled from their home in Covina to spend some time by the coast in Pismo Beach. From a perch on the peir high above the crashing waves, a young Gutierrez watched in wonderment as surfers below gracefully carved through water on their longboards. They were shooting the pier, catching barrels. One of the old timers smiled and waved at a wide-eyed Gutierrez.

"I was captured by these majestic men," Gutierrez recalls. "I was absolutely amazed, and I knew right then that that's where I wanted to be."

By the time he turned 9, Gutierrez had taken the surfboard his older brother hauled around on top of his car just to pick up girls and used it for what it was really meant to do. He was hooked.

Zen and the Art of Surfing

Now a 49-year-old married father of two, Gutierrez has shared his life-long love affair with surfing in his book, Zen and the Art of Surfing, a collection of short stories, most of them fictional tales centered on the ocean and a colorful cast of characters.

The stories in Zen were written over the course of 18 years and some of them formed Gutierrez's 1997 thesis while he was earning his master's degree in English from San Diego State University. A few of the tales first appeared as essays in surfing magazines before they were compiled with previously unpublished stories in the book.

Striking a Balance

The title of the book refers to the way surfing provides a spiritual compass for Gutierrez, who favors the legendary breaks at Swami's in Encinitas and Sunset Cliffs in San Diego.

"I try to strike a balance, and I love my family above all else," he says. "But there's a lot of truth in that sometimes I only feel totally at home when I'm in the ocean. Anyone who really surfs knows what I'm saying."

Surfing means so much to Gutierrez that his paddling out on weekday mornings nearly cost him his marriage before his wife accepted that such trips were part of the deal.

"Me and my friends, that's where a lot of us find our balance, find our center," Gutierrez says. "Zen is just about balance, finding that place in life."

Inspiring a New Generation

It's pretty safe to say if Gutierrez isn't in the water surfing, he's often writing about it or teaching others the art of putting pen to paper. He teaches ninth-grade English at Chula Vista High School for Creative and Performing Arts, where his students come from fairly hardscrabble circumstances and broken families. ("I have very few students from Leave It to Beaver-type homes.")

Gutierrez thinks some of their stories - such as the student who takes clumps of grass from campus and stuffs them into his pockets so he can plant them at home and give his younger sibling a nice, grassy yard to play in - would make a great collection of short stories.

"I hope that I am turning a lot of kids into writers, that that's what they are going to do one way or the other," Gutierrez says. "I believe, and I hope, that I've helped them discover some of that in them."