A Conversation with Terry Tierney, 
author of LUCKY RIDE

Lucky Ride is a historical novel, set in the ’60s. Why did you decide to set the novel when you did?

Initially, I did not intend it as an historical novel. The novel is based on my own experience of the ’60s, and as I wrote the novel the story evolved into a broader portrait of the ’60s and a reflection of our contemporary time. Although many of the characters and situations in the novel can be seen as cultural artifacts, I believe resonant themes like escape, renewal, friendship, and romance provide valuable insights. The cultural divisions of the’60s, in particular, bear similarity to what we experience now. Slogans like “America Love It or Leave It” echo in both eras. 

During Flash’s hitchhiking trip across the country, he confronts many discordant types of people, including law enforcement, who question his values, and he must defend himself. The hostile conversations Flash encounters, even around the dinner table, are similar to ones I have recently seen. In some ways the ’60s seem less divisive, but that might be my view in retrospect. Despite the distrust of other voices and the general malaise of the Vietnam War, along with their own personal failures, Flash and his fellow characters embody a sense of hope and possible reconciliation. I wish we could get back to that tenuous feeling. 

How autobiographical is this story?

My experiences provide the grist of the novel. I hitchhiked across the country, served on Adak, smoked a lot of weed, confronted poverty, and experienced relationships both idyllic and doomed. However, the ultimate story of Lucky Ride is invented as are all of the characters. Some scenes are similar to events that happened in real life, but more scenes are entirely imagined. It’s possible though unintentional that a character might share a quirk or trait with a real person. This includes Flash the narrator, who is not me, though I wish I had some of his qualities. My intent was to tell an entertaining story--an historical novel--not a history or a memoir.  


Why did you decide to make use of flashbacks to help tell Flash’s story?

I understand that some editors and writing teachers discourage flashbacks, but they provide key dramatic devices and perspectives within Lucky Ride. Since much of hitchhiking, and travel in general, involves long durations of dullness between moments of excitement, the flashbacks fill in dramatic space. I see them as similar to Shakespearean comedy scenes within his tragedies. 

Flashbacks also fit because Flash is trying to reconcile his past with his present and future, and he recalls his friends on Adak, for example, when he is on the road to visit them. Similarly, Flash remembers earlier scenes with Ronnie when he is considering the next steps in their unraveling relationship. The flashbacks tend to be stories themselves and often humorous. The Adak flashbacks in particular might be stories you would tell your friends over a beer.

The entire story is told over one long cross-country road trip from New York to California and back again. How did you decide to structure the novel the way you did?

On one level Lucky Ride describes Flash’s wild hitchhiking trip, but it’s also the story of his dying marriage and his struggle to reconstruct his life after his military service, which is echoed by several other characters. I structured the novel around the road trip because it contains both the desire for escape and the yearning for home and closure we endure when our relationships are falling apart. Similarly, characters separated from their families or stranded in places like Adak confront the depths of homesickness. When they emerge from an experience of physical and emotional displacement, they try to reconnect the pieces of their former lives, but none of it quite fits. I liken this to the feeling of coming home after a long trip when everything has changed but your memory of the way it was before you left.

What feeds your writing process?

I like to write first thing in the morning, after a short walk and a cup of coffee. My walks and  my dreams often give me an idea or phrase to get me going. Music is a great background for writing, but I find I cannot listen to vocals. My preferred genre are jazz and classical music, though I tend most often to queue up jazz. Miles Davis is one of my favorite artists, and his album “Bitches Brew” has carried me through many writing sessions. The unstructured feel of the tunes sets my mind free.

Can you describe your journey as a writer, how you got to the point of publishing your first novel?

The key word for my writing journey is persistence. I always wanted to write, and while in high school my first career choice was journalism, which I stoked by writing for my school and college newspapers. After I dropped out of college and got sucked into the draft, I returned to college under the GI Bill and finished with a double major in English and Political Science. Unfortunately, I found no viable journalism jobs. To pay the bills I fell back on the technical experience I had gained before I entered the service. Along the way I also acquired a passion for literature, which blossomed into writing my own poetry and stories. 

I earned an MA in English by attending night classes, and I eventually left my job to accept a PhD fellowship. After graduate school I taught college English as a visiting lecturer, but I could not land a position with any stability. So I went back to technical work. In parallel I continued to write whenever I could, and I picked up a few poetry and fiction publications. Now that I’ve retired from chasing software bugs, I have concentrated on writing. I am grateful to my publisher Unsolicited Press for allowing me to live my dream.

Who are the authors who most inspired you while writing Lucky Ride?

The road story is integral to our narrative tradition, of course, from Homer and Chaucer through Jack Kerouac and later writers. When I realized the book was best structured as a road story, my first inspiration was Jack Kerouac, but most novels are journeys of one kind or another, e.g. birth to adulthood, infatuation to marriage, courage to disillusionment. I love Kerouac’s characters, their visions, and their literary aspirations. His prose is mesmerizing. But Kerouac’s characters seldom if ever hitchhike, so in that regard I feel kinship with John Steinbeck’s characters who have nothing but the road. I also draw on Tom Wolfe with Ken Kesey’s famous bus, and Hunter S. Thompson. My narrative style probably owes more to Hemingway and Raymond Chandler, but I love all good writing.

What would you like your readers to take away from the book?

I hope readers will share moments of realization and epiphany with the characters as they confront quirky people and unusual places while struggling with their own cycles of young love, divorce, and reconciliation. I hope the irreverent content and fast pace of the novel will draw readers into the experience. I want readers to enjoy the ride.

Nightstill
		By Steven Hill 

Bruised moon, imperfect crystal
I am tied to the land where I am,
and the land maws like a pit bull's jaw
sucks from me through my feet.
I am no plant
converting sunlight effortlessly,
I break the dirt with a hoe
and want to own my own
square piece,
as any plant sprouting leaves.
It is not perfect, my situation, or perhaps it is
my expectation, or my explanations, 
my imperfections, or
my description of the world,
not Buddhist, not billionaire, not America First
but mine.

And now there is time 
for refinement and deep breaths,
and what of that?
Now I shall breathe shallow and always come up short, and
what of that?
                 And that, and that?

                 Forced labor in China coal mines,
that is that and hard to deny,
and lethal to take deep breaths for
the fine black soot petrifies
bronchial tubes; 
the air is thick 
in Ferguson ghettos,
in Rohingya temples and Berlin bordellos,
among Emanuel AME Bible study death prayers, 
and there
the short quick breath is life,
the walls have ears,
              and that is that.

The short, quick breath is love,
is resuscitation,
for who in love has time for long, deep inhales?
There is so much to love, so much that requires constant spark.
Fragile life withers and the plant needs water,
the roof begs repair, the faucet leaks,
the dull rock of entropy evaporates
by what divine rule shall I choose?
My child cries in the purple of the night, 
and off I go
       to comfort her:

                 and when the child is once again asleep,
                 bald head reflecting moonlight

back to bed I crawl
to the sound of my partner's hairy snores.
At the edge of the bed and rapid eye dreams
on my knees I pause
and claim all my voices—

none are silenced under the bruised moon,
rising up as crystal dew through the straws of my legs

                 voices dialogue back and forth,
                 they find common ground for armistice and conditions  

                 "Silent night, holy night
                  All is calm, all is bright..."

and for a few deep breaths I love this terrible land,
like the bombings in my body 
of Mariupol.

Time appears as an imperfect crystal,
a jagged silhouette rising in the nightstill  sky.
Moonlights, bouncing on the water,
silhouette branches that drip like black fingers,
                 that grip a hammer or a sickle,
                 or a galaxy balanced sideways,
for humans to comprehend.

[1] On June 17, 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans in the middle of an evening Bible study at the 200 year-old Emanuel  AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

[1] The German language often smashes together two or more words to form a longer word that becomes a concept, such as freundschaftsbeziehunge, which means “bonds of friendship.” Nightstill is that quiet time in the middle of a sleepless night, when suddenly you feel content and whole in the knowledge of all things and your place in it. Yet you cannot corral that knowledge, and by the morning you remember almost nothing.

Steven Hill (www.Steven-Hill.com) is an author whose essays, articles and media interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Guardian, Le Monde, NPR, PBS, BBC, C-SPAN, Democracy Now and many others. He has published short fiction, poems and plays in a number of publications, including Columbia Journal, Minnesota Review, San Fernando Poetry Journal, Struggle, Kinnikinnik, Sea-Town Crier, Written Arts, Prophetic Voices, and the anthologies Sparkle and Blink, Grasp the Rainbow, Poets for a Livable Planet, and Seattle Poets. His plays have been produced in New York City (Off Off Broadway) , Washington DC and San Francisco. He also paints, collages, and composes and plays music. He is a graduate of Yale University.

Roadrunner v. Coyotes

He parted the blinds.
It was still a desert out there.
The sign he’d put up, INTERCOURSE WITH A STRANGER- FREE COFFEE…had gone unanswered.

The room he had was the best in the house as it was located kitty-corner from the motel office which was connected to the gas station which in itself contained a fair amount of food, plenty gas (obviously) and was pretty well stocked with what he would need for years, especially if he had another one of those episodes again.
However, living among this bounty of microwavable cheeseburgers along with gallons of subpar coffee and a wide variety of cigarettes to accelerate his way towards death, he would starkly wonder how long had this kingdom been abandoned?

The only times he encountered other humans was when he patrolled the border. 
No vehicles had ever stopped by in all his months of living here.
He smashed all the mirrors in the rooms, one day when the violent heat of the moment unleashed something stomach churning yet thunderous from his mortal belly. 
After what he did even though it was with good cause, he could no longer face himself in a reflective surface, incapable of fully accepting the beast who masqueraded as the man…the man on the road.

Those were the times he was happiest.
Out on the blacktop into the desert where the real road was.
Along with the coyotes hunted.
Tricksters running the numbers game. A nonzero logic resulting in exploitation and death with minimal profit afforded to these animals scratching out a meager existence.
A fury of dust in the distance caught his attention. 
It would be instant coffee today and a few hits of peanut butter off the knife to start the day in higher gear than usual. He looked at the hammer stuck in the wall, now well over a week. He pulled it effortlessly from the cheap drywall and flung it on the floor, seeing that bits of bone, hair and meat were still the residents of the spattered collective.

He lit a cigarette as he drank his instant coffee nude. 
Nothing better than a smoke and naked coffee drinking, even if it tasted like boiled chalk.  
He felt that in a former life, some woman or even non-binary companion would compliment how the orange plastic mug accentuated his olive tone getting darker for desert days.
He never used to kill coyotes.
Nor had he taken any joy from it.
Until the hammer incident.

It already had been an upsetting scorcher of a day, but he could never fully justify the use of the hammer nor the shrill howling that ensued from the beast’s mouth akin to maniacal laughter.
The coyote’s particular name had been King Cock. Cock or rooster was a common name among coyotes. This one had slain the rest of the “roosters” for the most part in a display of unnatural dominance in which the only beak and set talons ravaging the henhouse would King Cock’s fangs and claws.
	“Beep, beep!”

Were the words, he seemingly heard as he delivered the deathblow to the coyote which caused him to question reality, pondering how much of this was actually real and imagining a time he used to pray and what it meant and how, even if he truly believed in anything none of it would have made a difference.
Coyotes like King Cock would still exist. 
Men left abandoned and dying of thirst would still be cooking from the inside, making love to cacti as their lovers and daughters would be ravaged and dismembered before reaching the promised land. 

Bodies left headless and nude. 
Limp. Like many a hen.
KING COCK “You know, Roadrunner…this reminds me of a joke.
Roadrunner had raised the hammer over the bound figure up against the office wall.
KING COCK “Actually, everything has been reminding me of a joke…children with cancer, decapitated teenage hotties, poor chumps boiling inside from the sun on the hot sand-“
THWACK!

King Cock, undeterred. Spat blood. Grinned.
KING COCK “So what did the hooker say when her head got-“
THWACK!
Eye socket cracked. A few loose teeth. Manic gaze. Unhindered.
KING COCK “…blown off?”
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! 

Until there was just a jaw and shoulders were dislocated.
Roadrunner sat in silence.
Covered in blood, guts and skeleton fragments. 
He wondered what color his hair color used to be, and would it still look the same once the gore and excess grime had been shampooed from it.
He sat like that until sundown.
Sunrise and sundown again.

So what did the hooker say after she got her head blown off?
The world was falling.
People still crossed the border from some kind of hell in the stillborn belief that angels protected America. 
He vowed never to take dreams away from the people living nightmares.
Any dream worth dreaming was a dream worth fighting for.
Did he say that?
Was it his grandfather or something from a movie?

The 1970 Plymouth Roadrunner drove like flowing water, the 940-horsepower engine sounded like hell breathing fire. A sun faded black with speckles of exposed primer much like the bird’s feathers it was named after. Oversized tires with lethal rims for flattening tires or people along with a protruding battering ram in place of a bumper akin to a warlike beak improving speed through aerodynamics. 
He was called Roadrunner, but this was the real Roadrunner.
The driver’s side was insulated from the rest of the car, in a queer booth that was once referred to as being “death proof” as long as you were driving…the passengers or anyone else in the trunk…not so good.

DRIVER “We are on the road Roadrunner! We’re running!”
ROADRUNNER “No need to shout Billy-Jack, I am everywhere.”
The hastily constructed mock AI replied to the driver who had an affinity for the lost years of television and cinema.
Billy-Jack/Roadrunner, he never thought of himself as either of those. 
Just a man in a leather jacket and jeans with a simple sawed-off shotgun and chainsaw. 

Today it was sans jacket and a woven poncho instead like an oil burning Sergio Leone anti-hero. He drove toward the glint he saw moments ago to find nothing but desolation until something or rather plural something rose from the sand…humanoid shapes tied together in masks, hands behind their backs with heads down. 
He slammed the brakes.
Too late.
The car hit someone. 

Meat cracked, organs crushed, and wet snapping noises invades his ears before the explosions occurred.
The car flew in the air and landed on the passenger’s side. 
Luckily for him, the “death proof” booth was actually death proof. There would be bruises.
He surveyed what he could.
The hit were already dead. Corpses as landmines. Entrapment.

More things less than noble and more wicked headed his way. Head to toe denim, gasmasks and welding masks, brandishing cutting torches, tire-irons, some sort of industrial saw and small power generator held by two others. One crazy figure stood over him, a rotting hallowed out pig head as a mask, clad in denim longhair with bullets tied in them. He pumped his gun.
Ears ringing. Sparks flying. 
The coyotes would have vengeance.
Pulled out, he tried to remain limp. 
A barrel shoved against his rectum proved he wasn’t unconscious.

Something, with pointed ears and a snout was placed in front of him or rather it rode in front of him. Flanked by more masked individuals in fire-retardant suits holding transparent shields around it. A corpulent figure in a motorized wheelchair, army fatigues and an oversized paper mâché Coyote head.
They called him KING COYOTE. 

There were a lot of kings in this land of insane kings.
A mad king was something to be afraid of but a mad king with a vendetta with command over the nomadic criminals with a sinister sense of order was like hell erupting through the earth and not stopping. It wasn’t just about halting human trafficking, the king who had put in his motorized throne by the Roadrunner which had decimated his original throne months ago. 

KING COYOTE “Roadrunner, it is now time to die, yes?”
He gestured to the men holding the generator who grabbed Billy-Jack and held him with his arms outstretched like a martyr. 
Pig-head placed the barrel of his weapon underneath his victim’s chin, while a welder who used the torch to help open the driver’s side door placed in the white-hot flame near his sternum.
KING COYOTE “A hero’s death intrigues. A hero’s death offers us power. Head or heart? What shall we reap of first, hero?”
He wasn’t hero. He didn’t know what he was only that he was going to die, and no one would remember him and then the Earth began to shake…
The ground gave way as if hallow.

The Roadrunner, both man and car were swallowed into darkness along with those on the opposite side of the shields.
There was screaming and tearing sounds. Gunshots. Teeth sinking into something and someone speaking in tongues and hissing.
He couldn’t move, too broken and disoriented but he had landed on something soft. A sensual naked thigh from under a green dress glided over his chest. He looked up at the loveliest yellow eyes he had ever seen, and raven hair on the copper skinned woman who flicked out a serpentine tongue.

“Coyote Trickers pay homage to the reptiles of the desert. I am the Venom-Queen, you are my consort. My prize. My property.”
Being dead would wait another day.

Junkyard lyrics

i
The memories jerked up, 
so the butterflies flies intact
out of the raging fire

into your innocent catch

pours over your fears,

it's a moment of doubt
encased desires mount further

drying in the sunlight 
of your quiet innocence

wanting more of their less,
another history phased

& each history recognizes
more of only what it destroyed,

the old pleasure
repeated measures

Of unexplained things.

Hypnotized lyrics
of synchronized chaos.

The chaos’s embraces

Like hitting a thousand times
by a rocketing ice.

ii
The first Alago word I lost
was 'elayaba'.
The word for there's more, I think.
Silent more. The more in a smile. 
The more in the tears I gave to my Allah
The day he took my mother.

Little more for my prayers than mouth, 
more doubt fleeing my eyes again
more remembrance of memories.

iii

In the moonless anthology
of African contemporary poetry

flowers with the body of stone
talks
have blood
& it pours like champagne gases

It's a synchronized chaos.

The government have ears in poetry.

Eight four soldiers battling terrorist
that stripped off their uniforms
throw away guns
& any military resemblance
& flee 

Celebrates surviving a masked war
after being dismissed.

In a war, right, they say,
lives near wounds, scars & grave.

In this type of synchronized chaos

Pulling what was lost
out of the death is impossible.




Deration

God's anguish derails down further
through the faults in his perfect system.

The Angel would come in flesh like a man
& the vultures would ask to be eaten.

Our tired tomorrows are taking a risk,
Ghosts too are taking a risk of coming back.

The mechanical beasts of the West strikes.
Things are quickening towards the grave.

The sun goes down quiet with hundreds
The memories rises as non-glitter sun

Yesterday, with a room for all chained us, 
Its mystery slices us under its charms.

Heaven glitters in the alphabet of Devil's name
& God became the cracked holes into the hell.