Books by Neva Sullaway
Across memoir, maritime history, oral history, film, and editorial collaboration, Neva Sullaway preserves stories shaped by memory, the sea, conflict and survival.
I ran away to sea at 23. While attempting to escape a brief marriage and the post-Vietnam War unrest (1970s), I fled seaward and hitchhiked across the South Pacific, facing belligerent skippers, sharks, sickness & naive love on a beautiful island. After two years, of sailing, hiking & biking, I ended up on a remote island, an Aboriginal Reserve, in Northeastern Australia. It was there I learned life’s lessons.
In the words of Paul Gauguin, I wondered:
Where Do We come From?
What are We?
Where are We Going?
“Chasing Dreamtime takes you on a gripping parallel journey sailing across the Pacific and through the emotional storms which cloud the writer’s past…”
“Skipping pages in Sullaway’s gripping tale is nigh on impossible... This book’s structure, style and scope give it a legitimate claim to being top-tier maritime literature.”
Author and Storyteller
Neva’s writing moves between memoir, maritime history, cultural history, and documentary storytelling.
Editor and Publishing Partner
Neva has spent decades helping writers transform ideas, memories, research, and unfinished manuscripts into books with clarity and purpose.
Her editorial work extends far beyond copyediting. She helps authors discover the structure beneath their material, strengthen the narrative, preserve their authentic voice, and understand what the reader needs in order to remain connected to the story.
She has worked with memoirists, historians, veterans, researchers, subject-matter experts, and first-time authors—often on projects involving complex histories or deeply personal experiences.
As the editor of Corporal Cannon: A Female Marine in Afghanistan, Neva helped shape Savannah Cannon’s candid account of military service, trauma, responsibility, and survival into a focused memoir without smoothing away its difficult truths.
Her philosophy is simple:
The editor’s role is not to take over the story. It is to help the writer reveal the strongest and most honest version of it.
Maritime Publishing and Film
Neva’s work also includes maritime scholarship, visual storytelling and documentary film.
She created, edited and published the Maritime Museum’s peer-reviewed Journal of Pacific Maritime History for 10 yrs. One Journal became a book, Swift Boats at War in Vietnam, with 38-firsthand stories from those who served aboard the small and vulnerable Swift Boats in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Neva created the nonprofit Ocean Magic Productions, with Doc and Ceci White, in an effort to explore and discover myriad aspects of our Pacific Marine Corridor via books and short films.
Her interests are not limited to maritime journeys. It’s the cultures surrounding them—the communities, traditions, relationships, challenges and personal histories carried across oceans, to landscapes of war.
“Roper Jackson had said there is a Power, a Magic, in everything. I finally understood—it wasn’t something you could see, you had to experience it.”
—Chasing Dreamtime