An unlikely and inexplicable event prompts Adrian Lomachenko to quit his high-paying job in the financial district of San Francisco and pursue a career in writing, his long-repressed true calling. Determined to write a novel that examines the nature of unlikely and inexplicable events and how they impact our lives, he relocates to the quaint artistic community of Jacksonville, Oregon, where he will seat himself daily at 6:00 am at the same table in the town's eclectic coffee shop, the Good Bean Café, observe its patrons, engage in conversation, and with a little help from his capricious Muse, Miranda, write a story around a watershed moment in the lives of each of twelve characters, real or imagined, one for each month of the year. The challenge will be to finish each story in the month in which it was begun, and his book within a year. Does he meet his goal? And how does the exploration of unlikely and inexplicable events affect his life going forward?
My Year at the Good Bean Café is a quirky work of metafiction, a story about itself and its own creation, that explores the nature of identity, the process of becoming, the imponderable intelligence of the Universe, and the magic of art in all its manifestations.
Author Biography:
A prolific short story writer, EA Luetkemeyer's fiction has appeared in the literary journals Sou'wester, Opium Magazine, Del Sol Review, Perversion Magazine, The Ilanot Review, Cerasus Magazine, Rhodora, Centrifictionist, and The ShabdAaweg Review. His flash fiction piece, "The Southwest Chief," was named a finalist in The Wild Atlantic Writing Awards, and his story "Bead by Bead," a finalist in the anthology Stories That Must be Told, a publication of Tulip Tree Press. He is the author of the memoir "The Book of Chuck," and the novels "Inside the Mind of Martin Mueller" and "Penitentiary Tales: a Love Story," a finalist in the 2020 Wishing Shelf Book Awards. He has been a martial artist, a long distance runner, an outlaw, a fugitive, an inmate, a husband and father, and, by his own admission, sometimes a fool. Awarded an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, in 2015, he lives and writes in the picturesque Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon where, with inspiration from his capricious Muse, Miranda, he is at work on his next novel, "The Life and Death of Louie Amato."For excerpts and reviews of his work, visit www.ealuetkemeyer.com.
