BRUNSWICK, Maine - Sparring with the Portland Boxing Club's most promising middleweight a year ago, Jaed Coffin suffered a nasty neck injury. It left the adventuresome young Mainer unable to do a push-up without feeling nauseated for months.
"It kind of made me realize I'm a writer," he says with a smile.
In fact, Coffin, 28, has been preparing for a writing career for years. Like his hero Ernest Hemingway, he has traveled the globe in search of experiences - sea kayaking from Seattle to Alaska, backpacking around Mexico, and, yes, spending several months at the bullfights in Spain. But it was his unusual heritage - half old Yankee, half ancient Thai - that led him to the subject of his first book. Coffin's new memoir, "A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants," chronicles the months he spent in 2001 in a temple in his mother's native Thailand, where he was ordained as a Buddhist monk.
Fathered by an American soldier who descends from the seafaring Coffin family, the future writer was studying philosophy at Middlebury College when he decided to spend a summer becoming ordained in Thailand. It was, he felt, time to truly contemplate the strange dichotomy of his deep familial connection to Thailand and his all-American upbringing in Brunswick.
"My idea of the world was very much New England-y, Caucasian, L.L. Bean-y," he says. He'd often wondered how to reconcile that background with the fact that he had an enormous, and very different, family in Thailand.
Hale and gracious, introspective yet clearly comfortable in his own skin, he is unmistakably a product of both cultures. Though his father left the family when Coffin and his older sister, Tahnthawan, were toddlers, they remained close. Jaed (pronounced Jed) spent summers with his father at his home near Burlington, Vt., playing baseball - his father coached - and attending a Native American survival-skills camp.
"I wanted to be a warrior," Coffin says.
His father, a staff psychologist with the Vermont National Guard, encouraged a certain rigor in his son from a young age, preparing Jaed for solo hikes on the Long Trail and presenting him with a copy of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" when the boy was 12.
"He was big into mythology and ideas," recalls the son. Though he wasn't a professor's kid like some of his buddies growing up in Brunswick - the Bowdoin College campus is just across the street from his mother's house - he says his father instilled in him "a high level of self-importance. Not in a vain way but a romantic way. He taught me that my life mattered."
Yet it was his mother's dauntlessness in bringing up her two children on her own in America that truly shaped him, Coffin maintains. "My mom's tougher," he says. "There's no two ways about it."
Panee Muncharoen-Coffin recently donated her savings from nearly 25 years on staff at the local hospital to build a library in Panomsarakram, her Thai hometown. One of the many family photos on the refrigerator in her house shows her in her marathon-running days, posing with her two young children.
"She's nails," her son says with a laugh.
She is still his inspiration. After becoming a monk, Coffin spent a year in Alaska, teaching literacy to Native Americans and boxing on the amateur Roughhouse circuit.
"I fought fishermen and cannery workers," he says. "Some of them were smoking butts and drinking beers two hours before the fights."
He also made his trips to Spain and Mexico, feeding his wanderlust. At the monastery in Thailand, his closest companion had exasperated Coffin by claiming that he wanted to spend his life meditating in a cave.
"It is better to go find the Buddha in many places," the American had argued.
Yet after living the peripatetic lifestyle for a few years, he began to feel drawn back to his native New England. "There's a real landscape here," Coffin says. "The Midcoast [Maine] beaches and woods are a lot more meaningful to me than I thought.
"Cruising around has been great, but I can feel a shift. There are responsibilities I didn't really understand I had, like being around for my mom, giving back to the community. I can get a lot done here."
"As worldly as he is," says the writer Lewis Robinson, who as an instructor in the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast Writing Program befriended Coffin, "he's really dedicated to Maine. He wants to talk to kids in the state about writing and reading."
Upon returning to his hometown Coffin worked on the water, like so many in his father's sprawling family ("two and a half pages of Coffins in the phone book," he says). Off the lobster docks, however, he took after a relation of another kind, the Rhodes scholar Robert Peter Tristram Coffin, who taught at Bowdoin and won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1936.
By the time he completed the Stonecoast program last summer, Coffin already had a 600-page prospective novel based on his Mexico excursion under his belt, not to mention the publishing deal for "A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants."
"He'd been out on his own," says Robinson, "and he understood the importance of diligence and spending quiet hours every day. It's a great combination."
Though Coffin rents his own place, he's been spending plenty of time at the house he grew up in, with its wooden elephants and bowed Thai instruments and Neil Young playing quietly on the stereo. He wrote much of his memoir at a tiny green desk in a roughhewn workspace at the back of his mother's garage. Hanging overhead is an enormous pile of paper - the various drafts of the manuscript - bundled in thick rope.
"It's my bounty," he says, "like a collection of scalps."
