By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter
Ebbing Tide Publishing’s mission statement says, in part, “We believe good stories should say something and be thoughtful. Though their messages need not be obvious, they should provoke and cajole.”
“Autumn Run,” the recently published novel from former Kenai Central High School student Alan Bahr, does just that.
“Autumn Run,” which is set in Southcentral, centers on three lost souls who are looking for answers — seeking to establish or validate their faith in a higher power, in themselves, in their own histories or heritage, and in the natural world; and seeking atonement or redemption for their own perceived sins.
As these three individuals search for answers and ask questions of God, themselves and of nature itself, the reader is asked to do the same. Bahr skillfully weaves their three disparate searches into a single narrative by having the characters cross paths in conventional and unconventional ways.
In Nikolai (a thinly veiled Kenai), the main character, a Bush pilot named Patch Taggart, attempts to unravel the mystery in the pages of the journal left behind by young Kit Lerner after her unfortunate death. Across Cook Inlet, meanwhile, Jesse Toyonek, an Athabascan Native, leaves his increasingly modern village to reconnect with the more primal ways of his ancestors. Soon, the reader can see that Taggart’s actions and Toyonek’s must eventually draw them together — and that the posthumous words of Lerner may have the chance to help heal them both.
Bahr, a 1976 KCHS alum who has lived in California for most of the past 15 years, has had short fiction published in two literary journals and in Alaska Men magazine, but “Autumn Run” marks the publication of his first novel. He is excited — with more than a hint of trepidation — about the event.
“It’s frightening!” he said recently. “I liken it to when my wife and I had our first child. Up until the day she delivered, it was all anticipation and, ‘Won’t this be great!’ and, ‘We’ll be able to do this and do that!’ and, ‘We’ll be able to watch this life grow!’ It was all just looking forward to how wonderful it was going to be.
“When she delivered, I remember walking out of the hospital thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I done? What have we done? We’ve got this huge responsibility now!’ And that’s almost exactly the feeling that I had when I found out the book was going to go into print. Up until the time it went into print, it was just all, ‘Finally! I’ve been working so hard at this, and finally this is going to happen!’
“And then when it did, I thought, ‘What are people going to think?’ That’s when you start playing Monday-morning quarterback and think, ‘Should I really have said that? Should I really have said this?’”
Bahr’s fretfulness about his new creation is perhaps understandable in light of the long journey he has undertaken to produce a novel he felt was worthy of publication, and then to actually get it into print.
After writing two previous novels that he refers to as “junk,” he finally completed “Autumn Run” about seven years ago. Sometime later, he said, he was contacted by a prestigious West Coast literary agent who told him she wanted to turn his work into a best seller. She made promises that were not fulfilled, he said, and when she later dropped him from her services, his attempts to find a new agent were thwarted by the unwillingness of others to take on a novel that his first agent had given up on.
Years later, however, his book was rescued from publication limbo by a pair of editors from a publishing house that had once reviewed Bahr’s manuscript. The editors had started up their own publishing company, Ebbing Tide, and they wrote to Bahr to express interest in his novel.
“I was just surprised they remembered it after that long a time,” Bahr said. “I guess I’m lucky in that way.”
Now it hits bookshelves with a nice pedigree: a semifinalist in the 2009 Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition, plus literary merit awards from the California Writers Club and the Associated Writers Program.
Although Bahr has not lived for any extended period in Alaska since graduating from high school, he said that he set the novel and the fiction he has worked on since in Alaska because, despite the time and distance, he still feels a part of this state.
“I’ve never been able to get Alaska out of my head,” he said. “There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t wish I could just pick up and move there. And that was always the plan. I told my wife when we first started dating that, if we were going to get married, we were eventually going to live in Alaska. And that was not easy for her, but she agreed. She’s from Hawaii.”
However, Bahr’s degree in economics, followed by his MBA, directed him into investment banking, and he spent much of his early adulthood working for Wall Street firms and living in Japan. Although Alaska loomed farther and farther in his rearview mirror, his fascination for his old home never waned and finally found emergence in his fiction.
He recalled a phrase he had heard initially in the 1970s, “When you come to Alaska, you never go all the way home.” He said that that sentiment has been particularly true for him.
“A lot of the short stories I write are set in Alaska. My second completed novel, and the one I’m working on now, are both set in Alaska. I just think the place lends itself to story.”
Alaska certainly figures prominently in “Autumn Run.”
“In fact,” Bahr said, “a lot of people as they read the book say that Alaska emerges as an important fourth character.”
As winter begins to settle over the west side of Cook Inlet, Patch Taggart’s search for answers leads him to trace Kit Lerner’s footsteps down the wild Killborn River, while Jesse Toyonek’s search leads him to the lower reaches of the same countryside. Both men — and Lerner, via frequent journal excerpts — contemplate their connection to the earth as they attempt to exorcise the personal demons that drove them to such desperation.
Each character is on the run from an event in his or her past — a tragic accident, a poor decision, a reckless action — and the solace and the dangers that each finds in nature help propel them all toward possible solutions. It is each character’s “run” that forms a portion of the double-entendre in the title of this novel.
Bahr, who calls himself “a terrible self-promoter,” will nevertheless be in the Kenai-Soldotna area in late July to attend a KCHS classes of the 1970s reunion and to promote his book. He and local poet Anne Coray (also a 1976 KCHS grad) will be on hand for a book signing at 5 p.m. July 23 at the Soldotna Sports Center, just prior to the reunion festivities.
Well done, Clark. No surprise there.