Book Review: November Road, by Lou Berney

While watching Martin Scorcese’s 15-hour epic The Irishman, I kept wishing that I was watching the (as-yet-unmade) film of Lou Berney’s November Road. The two stories share the setting and macho posturing of 1960s-era mafiosos, but Berney’s story is far more personal and engaging. The story unwinds in the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, 1963. We come to understand that our protagonist was a small cog in the wheels of the mafia machine that killed the president, and he himself is only beginning to understand what he has been a part of. When he realizes that everyone involved is getting whacked, he has to get out of town fast. With a killer on his tail, he stumbles upon a young divorcée and her two little girls. First he ingratiates himself, then he starts falling in love. The little family is a perfect cover for him--but he’s putting everyone at risk just by sticking around. If they can get to JFK, they can certainly get to him.

An old friend, Dave Medicus, puts out a fantastic podcast about books, The Inside Flap. Here's the episode where he interviews Lou Berney and finds out what the biggest rush of the author's life has been. (It has something to do with Stephen King.)

2019 Publications Round-up

In 2019, I received 96 rejections from literary magazines. These eight stories were accepted:

1. Always Running (Stain'd)
2. Cities of the Future (Suspect Press)
3. Satellite Presence (Retreat West)
4. Running Bear (F(r)iction)
5. Circle of Blazers (Chaleur)
6. Cloudscape (The Ghost Story)
7. Love and Death Under the Rain (Red Rock Review)
8. Little Paw (Infinite Worlds)

While I'm proud of all these publications, I'm not really sure what the point is in continually polishing my work and sending it out into the world. Despite eight successes, I'm still wearing the same shirts and driving the same car and going to bed at the same time every night. Rejection hasn't wrecked me, but acceptance hasn't affected me much, either. Some of the above publications are beautiful to hold in my hands--F(r)iction in particular is a gorgeous magazine--and I'm honored to have my work find a place in all their pages. And yet--so what? A few people, here and there, have presumably read my stories, but their reactions are unknown to me beyond a few thumbs-up on social media. Do they make it through to the last line? Do their eyes go still as they make some inner connection? Or do they skim a few paragraphs and move on? 

But it's worth remembering that I'm not really writing for that unknowable audience. I'm writing for a few close friends, and for myself, and I'd keep doing it even if I never get another acceptance. Although it would be nice to be able to splurge on some new shirts at some point. Bring it on, 2020. 

Notes on Social Media Cleanse

I did a Facebook blackout for a week, and ended up completely forgetting about the place—it was wonderful!

As a writer/musician, it’s not realistic for me to delete my account and walk away permanently—90% of the Indiegogo fundraising we did for our Firstimers debut album came from our heroic FB contacts. In the future, I hope to be able to entice some my social media friends into reading my novel, if it ever gets published. I know some brilliant people on FB, whose opinions I value, and I don’t want to lose those connections.

But walking away for a week felt great. The first hour was the hardest, when my thumb automatically opened the FB app on my phone several times like some kind of Pavlovian ingrained behavior. So I shifted the app onto another screen, buried among unused apps, and immediately forgot about it.

After a few days, I started getting a lot of FB emails: So-and-so posted a picture, somebody else replied to an event, whatever—which tells me that the algorithm noticed that I was inactive and wanted to pull me back in. That felt like a tiny victory. The best part is, when the week was finally over, I forgot to log back in. The app was no longer in its usual place, and my thumb had broken the habit of tapping it. I’m a few days late with this summary because of that. For those of you struggling with (a) the addictive nature of Facebook, and/or (b) the collusion of Facebook with white supremacy, right wing politics, and conspiracy-mongering, I highly recommend a week-long cleanse. You can come back, we’ll still be there. Where else can we go?

A.C. Koch on Facebook

RUNNING BEAR

What is the future of humanity? Can we survive our current dangerous flirtations with climate change and nuclear war? Do we even deserve to?

RUNNING BEAR tells the story of an ambitious project to design a mission capable of transporting a thousand highly-skilled humans to colonize another solar system, carrying along an Archive of everything that makes humanity worth saving--art, literature, cinema, poetry, and of course, science.

The story takes place over three interwoven time frames: Oscar Running Bear and his team of astronauts and scientists as they make their final preparations in the BioDome in the Nevada desert before ascending into orbit; Oscar's first conversations with the eccentric billionaire who's bankrolling the mission; and Oscar's troubled childhood on the Navajo reservation where he grew up. These three timelines collide in a bleak ending that seems to snuff out all hope for the mission and for humanity--and yet a few threads of hope remain.

RUNNING BEAR was awarded F(r)iction Magazine's Short Story Award in the spring of 2019, and has just been published online in issue #14--the Survival Issue. If you like what you read, rejoice: the story doesn't end here. In fact, this is just the opening chapter in a longer and more involved story, also titled RUNNING BEAR, which carries the story of the mission (and some of the same characters) much farther into the universe.

Art by Enrica Angiolni

Le Singe

Le Singe (2012)



Il ne faut jamais voir le singe dans les yeux--jamais!



Filmed with Gavin Dunnet's spooky-ass postcard. Seriously--don't look at it.

Night Shift

Night Shift (2010)



'Twas a spooky night, and 'tdidn't end well.



Filmed with Nick

Ezmoot's Wild Kingdom

Ezmoöt's Wild Kingdom (1999)



Sometimes the only thing keeping you sane is your non-stop monologue about the majestic dances of the moths in your window.



Filmed on location in Zacatecas, Mexico with Laura Grey in the spring of 1998. Not that many moths were harmed in the making of this motion picture.

ZYPREXIA!

Zyprexia! (2015)



When talking to yourself, it's important to remember which one of you is imaginary.

How to Drink Whiskey

How to Drink Whiskey (2014)



It's pretty simple, really.

But you're going to need both eyeglasses *and* sunglasses. This is non-negotiable.

The Kessel Run

Pata and I made this video with a fully functional Millennium Falcon in Zacatecas around 2005.

Yasuko Across Time and Space

Perpignan is an ancient city in the south of France. I lived there for a few months in the late summer/early fall of 1993, when my friend Layla Martinez du Chabot lent me her apartment at 4 Rue A. Simon in the center of the city while she traveled in Spain with her boyfriend and her dog. I spent my time there on a recurring circuit every day: morning espresso at the Cafe du Centre-ville, then a walk through the old quarter's medieval streets, then an afternoon and evening in the apartment playing songs and writing stories. Every single day, without fail.

One of those walks through the old quarter took me by the ancient palace of the Majorcan kings. A rough-voiced guitar player busking in the entrance made an impression on me. This story imagines the rest of that story.

YASUKO ACROSS TIME AND SPACE appeared in Andromeda Spaceways #71 in 2018. It's behind a paywall, but like all walls, it isn't very hard to get over.

Satellite Presence

Many years ago, I rode the Boulder-to-Denver bus, and happened to run into an old acquaintance. Rich Meyers had been the lead singer of Boulder's most accursed punk-rock band, Bunny Genghis. This night, he had an RTD balloon tied around his wrist, and he sent it bobbing behind the heads of random commuters in the seats in front of us. Their hair stood on end to meet the static attraction of the balloon, but they remained unaware of the power that was being wielded just behind them. "My satellite presence," Rich said in his tobacco'd growl.

Many years later, this story came out of that. Satellite Presence was awarded third place in Retreat West's 2018 fiction prize by judge Paul McVeigh, who called it, "Quirky and funny. I especially enjoyed the sci-fi-fantasy mystery of it which reminded me of The Twilight Zone shows I loved and learned so much from."

Agashi

I lived in Pusan, South Korea, in 1995-1996, teaching English as a foreign language at a franchise language institute called David English House. Near the end of that year I spent about a week in Hong Kong and Macau. Years later, I wrote this story as a way to explore and recapture some of the sensory richness of those experiences. I think all the Hong Kong cinema I'd soaked up in the meantime bled into the story as well: intrigue, double-crosses, secret villains and unexpected heroes.

Early drafts of this story didn't work, because I kept trying to engineer an ending that satisfied the protagonist. A critique by Ian Hooper got me thinking about it in a new way: "What if Krasner is the real hero, and the protagonist is just a craven side-kick who gets shot at the end of the first act?" That struck me as a brilliant way to re-cast the roles. Not long after that, the first draft of the story got an honorable mention in Night Train's fiction contest, and the contest judge Steve Almond sent me an email with a very kind and valuable critique. He also noted a weakness in the ending, and suggested some ways to let the protagonist's faults catch up with him. Armed with these suggestions, I recast the ending to pull the rug out from under the protagonist's feet, and I think the result is a more satisfying and surprising story. If a chapter two existed, I don't think the protagonist would survive it--but Krasner surely would, and so would the agashi.

Agashi won first place in the Raymond Carver Short Story Award in 2007, and was published in Carve Magazine, as well as in their year-end anthology.

Here's a song I wrote later, circling around the same theme: Sad Agashi Song

Dark as a Dungeon in the Heart

The night of 9/11, I couldn't sleep. There was a metal plate on the street a couple of blocks over, and every time a car clanked over it, my eyes shot open and my heart spiked. There was so much violence and sadness in the world.

This story started brewing that night. I was trying to boil the earth-spanning horror down to human scale, as a way of dealing with it. I wanted to connect it to music, which was my own refuge at the time, and I'd been listening to a lot of bluegrass thanks to time spent with my dear friend Molly--one of the great songwriters of all time. The title of the story, Dark as a Dungeon in the Heart, comes from the chorus of a traditional bluegrass number that Molly played. A song that romanticizes the coal mine: "Where the rain never falls, and the sun never shines / it's as dark as a dungeon in the heart of the mine."

The character I chose to hang this story on ended up being a musician. Her alcoholism and family dynamics became stand-ins for the helplessness and angst of 9/11. Originally, I planned for the grounding of airliners to be the reason why she had to drive cross country instead of fly, but I eventually decided against pegging the time period. The urge to drive sprang from her character instead, her desire to fix her life before it got out of control.

Skeptical readers may feel that the story traffics in too much Appalachian cliché, with porch-side hootenannies and grinning hillbillies. But I've spent some time around Molly's hometown in southern Ohio, and I've been to those whiskey-and-banjos hootenannies. It's real, and it's magical.

Woven Tale Press published this version of the story in Summer, 2018.

Photo Credit: Denise An (Instagram @mysterious_substance)

13 Questions with A.C. Koch

Coffin Bell is a journal of "dark literature." In the spring of 2019, they published my story Yacht Rock, about a guy who realizes that the background muzak is actually foretelling important events in his life. When he learns to read these signals, he transforms from a love-sick loner into an international gigolo/assassin. I guess that qualifies as "dark."

Anyway, Coffin Bell followed up with a request to do an interview, and sent me 13 questions to ponder. I'd never done something like that before, so it was fun to come up with answers to their strange and unexpected questions. Have a peek here: 13 Questions with A.C. Koch

Photo credit (and reflecto-spectre in the image): Denise An

Running Bear

RUNNING BEAR is a story about a brave group of scientists and astronauts who are planning the greatest endeavor in human history: an intergenerational starship to colonize another solar system. The only thing that could stop them is World War III--but those clouds on the horizon are starting to look like bad news.

Here are a few choice lines:

"A half dozen of those points of light were not stars at all. They described high arcs across the sky, tracing parabolas that carried them from the other side of the world to this side, to end it. Their movements were all but invisible against the backdrop of galaxies..."

This story is the opening chapter in the novel project I've been working on since 2014, and it sets out the premise that underpins the whole book. As a stand-alone short story, Running Bear was selected as the first prize winner in F(r)iction's Short Story Contest this year, and published in issue #14. It's a gorgeous magazine, available across North America at Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and at the Tattered Cover here in Denver.

Firing Jennifer Johnson

One of the things I love most about writing short fiction is the chance to sink into some other identity in order to see the world from someone else's eyes. This story, Firing Jennifer Johnson, plays with that in an attempt to explore themes of desire, maturity, and creativity, from a female perspective.

But wait. As a straight white male, is it acceptable for me to tell a story from the first-person POV of a gay woman? My answer as an artist is: Of course! No one can tell an artist to restrict his or her perspective, or to place certain ideas off limits.

But I also understand the view that the last thing the world needs is more straight white men telling other people's stories. So what should I do?

Keep writing, I guess. What else?

Because, going all the way back to the first stories I started dreaming up in elementary school, writing has always been a way for my mind to explore the world. What would it be like to be a carefree billionaire captain-of-industry, running the largest auto company in the world and battling evil Russian spies intent on blasting the space shuttle out of the sky with a super-plasma laser? (That was the plot of my first 'novel,' The Blue Mesa Takeover, starring Race McNelly, written longhand on fifty sheets of loose-leaf paper when I was in the fifth grade, and then bound in a duotang with illustrations and phony blurbs.)

Fast-forward thirty years and my mind went to different places. What would it be like to be a married woman who had to choose between professional success and her longing for the romance of youth? A close friend of mine was working through that dilemma at the time, and I wanted to understand it. That led me here, into the invented life of Jennifer Johnson.

FIRING JENNIFER JOHNSON was published by the Ilanot Review, an international literary magazine based in Israel, and the editors ended up nominating the story for a Pushcart Prize.

The Everything-Goes Garage Sale of My Love

I spent a decade reading every short story that appeared in The New Yorker. Most of the time I thought they were crap and flicked the page in disgust, moving on to the movie reviews. But I also sensed that there was a secret sauce involved, and I wanted to know what it was.

My friend Ian and I joked about the lameness of so many of these stories that always seemed to revolve around some divorcé(e) getting drunk at a garage sale and sinking into a miasma of upper-middle-class ennui. We were snotty about it, for sure, but we also wanted to know why those stories seemed to work so well despite being so off-putting (to us) in their subject matter.

This story, THE EVERYTHING-GOES GARAGE SALE OF MY LOVE, was an attempt to co-opt and hijack some of those New Yorker themes and apply them to a context that was more familiar to me: late-90's hipster angst. I wrote this story in Zacatecas, Mexico, around 2001, when adult responsibilities were just beginning to settle on me, and the angst of youth still felt evocative. The Piltdown Review published it in the summer of 2018.

The Good Baker

The call for submissions at SunLit Story Time asked for heartwarming and optimistic stories. I nearly scrolled past, but then remembered that I had one piece from years ago that might fit the bill. I wrote THE GOOD BAKER in Zacatecas in the fall of 1998 as a reminiscence of the simpler days of working as a barista before becoming a full-time teacher. That there was a darker strand to this story seemed to escape the notice of the editor, who later asked me to remove the hint of an uncomfortable twist that I'd included in the original ending. This published version (also recorded as podcast audio) reflects that revised, sunnier ending.

As for that darker ending--here's the original last page:

Tea Cup

I worked at Common Grounds Coffeehouse in the Highlands as a barista for several years in the mid-90s while I was studying for my initial teaching license. I didn't really want to be an elementary school art teacher at the time--I was perfectly happy brewing coffee, making lattes, doing the Times crossword, and chatting with the regulars. Now that I'm three decades into a career in education, I look back on that job with longing. Part of me would have been perfectly happy to never leave the place.

This story is set at Common Grounds. It's about self-care, or, before we called it that, simply escape. Would you escape into the past, if you could? Or into nothingness?

TEA CUP was awarded an Honorable Mention in Gemini's Flash Fiction Contest in the fall of 2018.

Rio Muerto

There was a time when I really wanted to be a filmmaker. Movie ideas ran through my head all day long. Some of my short stories from that time read like storyboards for a movie that was never made. This is one of them. The story even contains a film-within-a-film, which is catnip to anyone in a Critical Cinema class. 

I was writing this while living in Zacatecas, Mexico, around 2005. When I got wind of a short story contest at the city newspaper, El Sol de Zacatecas, I set about translating my manuscript into Spanish. The problem was, I hadn't quite finished the story yet. No matter, I just plowed ahead with the translation, and ended up writing the ending in Spanish. Later, I had the weird experience of translating my own original ending in Spanish back into English. For any marginally bilingual writers out there, I recommend this experiment. It was bizarre to encounter my own thinking in another language which didn't quite translate into my native tongue. I've never felt more like two distinct people. 

The Spanish translation of the story, RIO MUERTO, ended up winning first place in that contest. The English version had never been published until it appeared in the Columbia Journal in the summer of 2018. 

Yacht Rock

What's the secret ingredient to romance?

What are the tell-tale signs that your lover is about to leave you?

But wait--the questions get weirder. How long would it take you to notice that any time you hear Africa by Toto, you never see your love again?

What is that song Sailing by Christopher Cross really about? And what's going on with that hypnotically evocative bossanova croon-fest Corcovado?

What if all these songs are influencing our lives but we just never pay enough attention? This story, YACHT ROCK, takes that light-hearted premise, fit for a romantic comedy, and runs with it in a much darker direction. It appeared in Coffin Bell in the spring of 2019.

Angry God

You know the feeling: sitting in a three-hour meeting on a Friday afternoon, squirming in frustration because you have a batch of emails you need to send out before the end of the work week, but feeling your motivation drain away by the minute as your boss drones on. Your colleagues all seem to go rigid as they attempt to keep their eyes open, and your spirit starts panting for a drink, any drink. Time slows to a stand-still.

ANGRY GOD emerges from that meeting. It's enough to make you Old-Testament-style angry, isn't it? This story appeared in Fictive Dream in August, 2018.

Bastille

BASTILLE is a story about the pleasures and terrors of solitude, set in a strangely empty Paris. We all want to be alone sometimes, but just how alone can you really take it? Would you drink the drink that erases absolutely everyone else in the world? This piece appeared in Wanderlust Journal in January, 2019.

Cloudscape

CLOUDSCAPE is about black market teleportation and the evil of power spanning tens of thousands of years of human history.

The first half of this story was originally written as a stand-alone piece, called SILVER AEROPLANE. I had no intention of extending the premise, but the idea whispered to me: All that stuff that disappeared--where did it go?

I love a shocking time-jump--who can forget the thrill of watching Castaway for the first time and seeing that mindblowing 'four years later' right after Tom Hanks knocks his tooth out with an ice skate, and now he's a scrawny, bearded prophet spearing fish in the lagoon? I hit on the idea that the stuff that was disappearing from the coat closet in SILVER AEROPLANE was traveling not only in space but also in time. Jump back fifty-thousand years, to a tribe of cave dwellers, and see where the story goes. That segment of the story, originally titled TWO DREAMS AND THE LIGHTNING STONE, forms the bookend of the story arc. The strangeness of the artifacts create their own mystery for Two Dreams and his grandfather, and the ominous turn at the end suggests that the course of human history might be about to change.

CLOUDSCAPE won the Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award in Spring of 2019, and will appear in the 21st Century Ghost Stories Anthology in 2021.

Cities of the Future

What if you could prevent a horrifying future by committing an unspeakable crime today? It's the killing-baby-Hitler scenario applied to our time, and the golden future we stand to attain. This short story, CITIES OF THE FUTURE, takes a peek at that future. It was published in Suspect Press's issue #22 in the summer of 2019, with some crackerjack line-editing by Editor-in-Chief Amanda E.K. and a wicked illustration by Lonnie MF Allen.

Firstimers ANVILS OF LOVE