I didn't set out to write about sex, though in some of these stories it does appear that that's what makes the turkey trot. Rather, the beginning was mundane enough. In August, 2008, I discovered two boxes of old letters in the basement of our house in Vermont, letters I received and saved between the ages of 18 and 29. For reasons I can’t explain, these crinkly typed and written pages ignited in me a creative frenzy. I resurrected and rewrote four old short stories and over the next eight months created seven new ones. Have I a favorite? I like them all, but it struck me in my final run-through for this volume that there was only one story, MY FRIEND, in which I did not change a single word. Here they are, hormones and all. Enjoy.
Ken Byerly was born on a farm in Stokes County, North Carolina. He moved west with his family at age 12, attended the University of Montana on an athletic scholarship and graduated in journalism. College summers he drove cross country to North Carolina and worked in the tobacco fields.
As editor of the Tidewater News in Franklin, VA., Ken won awards from the Virginia Press Association for editorial, news, feature and sports writing. He worked a year as a reporter for the Washington Post and left to travel for a year in Europe. Landing in New York on his return, he became a reporter specializing in politics and civil rights for Newsday on Long Island. While at Newsday, he helped author the bestselling sex spoof, Naked Came the Stranger.
He wrote the book for a musical, Cowboy, based on the life of Montana painter Charles M. Russell. The musical played briefly in small theaters in Connecticut and New York.
Ken became a stockbroker in New York, retired early and now lives in Vermont with his wife, Priscilla. He recently, with his wife’s help, completed a multi-year hike of the 2200-mile Appalachian Trail.
An excerpt from the short story, STREET OF DREAMS, by Ken Byerly
...The sun shone. The city beckoned. Steve burst free onto the sidewalks of New York, crossed 59th Street into Central Park and hurried north toward West 67th and Tavern on the Green. He called Deborah Messinger on his cell phone. “I’m wearing a nondescript gray sweater. I’m carrying a briefcase.”
“Are you tall?” Julie had asked Scott that in Street of Dreams.
What had Scott replied? Steve remembered. “By normal standards,” he said. “You’re in black, of course.” When Scott and Julie first met at a bistro near Wall Street in his novel, she wore black and joked that she carried a rose in her teeth.
“I forgot,” Deborah said. “I’m wearing burgundy.”
“Surprise. All the better,” Steve said.
He spotted her right away. Tall, coltish, exuding a coiled literary readiness, she wore high heels and sat with sun-tanned legs intertwined. “Well,” she said, rising. “I pictured you as sinewy and so you are.”
“’Sinewy.’” He rolled the word. “I’ll put that on my resume.”
“Your wife too?”
“I’m divorced.”
“My ex is a lawyer. He wants to run for political office. We didn’t have children. What about you?”
“No children.”
A hostess seated them in the Crystal Room overlooking Central Park. The sun shone on bicyclists outside, and runners, and women pushing baby carriages. “Isn’t it a gorgeous day! They closed the outdoor garden in September or we could have eaten out there. I requested a window table.”
They ordered wine by the glass, a New Zealand sauvignon blanc popular this year. “How was the conference? Did you learn new things?”
“I tell himself, ‘I’m not coming to another of these,’ but always something turns out helpful. Panning competitors’ products is hot these days. I get stimulus for stories.”
“That’s right. You said you write short stories too.”
“Five up and ready to go.”
“Not much market for them, you know.”
“I know. I’m concentrating on the novels.”
“I liked the sound of your voice on the telephone,” Deborah said.
“Did we talk on the phone?”
“Maybe not. Maybe it was the tone of your emails. I read the first one, the misdirected one, alone at night after coming home very late. I had just ended a relationship. On my desk lay a synopsis for a novel about vampires and ravaged childhoods and a grandmother who poisons pigeons. I saw your name and I remembered the outline you sent.”
“Street of Dreams. It sounded commercially romantic?”
“No, no; I liked Julie’s good honest masochism, the flip side of her aggressiveness. I liked the way you began her relationship with Scott. It’s not that sadism you see in novels and TV crime shows today, where people rape, tear out eyes and pour ink in wombs and hot district attorneys and plain clothes cops make jokes and exchange long glances -- they really care, you see, but to function they try to hold back the pain -- and then they go out and eat lobster dinners and we get slow motion shots of them walking down halls.”
Steve laughed. “Those slow motion shots,” he said. “They fold their arms and stare at the camera.”
“Pure shit. Of course, if it sells...” Deborah Messinger grinned.
Steve chuckled. “You sound like Julie in my book.”
“Do you fall in love with the women in your fiction?”
“I want to. I try to.”
“You can control them, you know, there at your word processer.”
“At first. Then they get away from me. That’s a cliche too, how writers create characters and then the characters gradually take over. I think I feel a warm flush on my face.”
“There’s nothing new under the sun,” Deborah said. “You do want them to take on lives of their own.”
“Sure. But open revolt would be scary.” A waitor arrived and recited the day’s specials. She ordered steak, he bluefish.
“So.” Deborah fixed him with deep brown eyes. “Scott, the midwestern WASP, discovers that Julie, the New York Jewish girl, enjoys being forced sexually. Is there much of that in your book?”
“Some. Not a lot.”
The literary agent rearranged her silverware. “That interests me,” she said.
“Professionally?”
“Personally too, if I dare say...”
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