Keel. is a lyrical, voice-driven literary novella set on the coast of Newfoundland. After his wife's death in a car accident, a young widower withdraws from the life they built together and becomes consumed by a singular purpose: constructing a wooden boat by hand and sailing it into the North Atlantic to seek reunion.
As grief deepens, the work becomes ritualized. What begins as a practical undertaking transforms into an act of devotion, allowing him to navigate a world that no longer feels recognizable. Memory intrudes without warning, collapsing past and present, while his understanding of God shifts toward something distant, permissive, and unknowable.
When the boat is completed, he sets out alone across the Atlantic. The voyage pushes him toward physical and psychological limits as hunger, exhaustion, exposure, and isolation erode the certainties that once sustained him. Guided by memory, prayer, and longing, he becomes increasingly consumed by the possibility that the journey might bring him closer to what death has taken.
As the boundary between devotion and delusion begins to blur, the voyage becomes a confrontation with grief itself. The novella closes on the recognition that loss cannot be overcome or escaped, but must instead be carried forward—a permanent part of the self, like the sea itself.
Influences
A Ghost Story by David Lowery
The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick
The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens
A Crow Looked at Me by Mount Eerie
Oblivion Hymns by Hammock
The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me by Brand New