Lights are on....nobody's home

I grew up in the rural South, where everything begins with a story. I love stories. What I love most is words, and the way a good writer can make one lean against the other in a perfect fit. Like an old stone wall in Ireland. How Shakespeare or William Faulkner or Solzhenitsyn make their words come to life.

    When Solzhenitsyn tells, in Cancer Ward, of how the little dog who was afraid of water apologized, first with his ears, then with his tail each time they approached the lake, I can see that dog. That's magic.

     In the summer of 1991, I decided to write a novel. (My second, though the first will probably always live in a closed drawer) My wife, Maggie, long ago adjusted to the ADD center of my being, how I could sit beside her, or stand in a crowded room, interacting while my mind was a thousand miles away. She nudges me sometimes, and whispers in my ear, "Lights are on...nobody's home."

     I'm always making up stories. I've done this for as long as I can remember. Telling myself bedtime stories to get to sleep - I still do, at my age. 

     Maggie and I have an old farmhouse in the Florida Panhandle, deep in the lush jungle that borders the wild Gulf of Mexico, where there are no street lights and, on moonless nights, stars, thick as dust, make a pure white light that can cast shadows on the ground.

    Our house is surrounded by huge pecan trees, and skirted with a wide porch filled with chairs and little tables, and we sit there (as the old folks say) "of an evening" and listen to the night. There was a time, in the early Nineties, when we could hear rapid arms fire and helicopters not too far from our house, just across Econfina Creek. Always in the dark of night. I began to imagine the ‘what if's' of Contras training there in that large area beyond the creek,  fenced and patrolled to keep riff-raff like me out, which only increases my curiosity; so with each distant burst of weapons fire, each thumping of helicopter rotors in the dark night, I began to create a story. The story became a novel, and I found first an agent then, through him, a publisher. My title, A Thousand Bridges, held on and the book was published to critical acclaim in 1992.

     The reviewers called it a political thriller, a detective mystery, but I think of it as a love story with a lot of death in it. I called it A Thousand Bridges, after one version of a saying fighter pilots in Vietnam passed around: ‘You build a thousand bridges and you're an architect, but just let one of those bridges fall down on market day and you're a bum again.'

A recent review from a blog called it  "An amazing fore-shadowing of today's current political climate!"

A Thousand Bridges was released by Walker Books, NYC. In a hardbound edition, it received a coveted Starred Review in Publishers Weekly, who also chose the book as one of their Top Ten First Fiction of the Year.
     Fantastic reviews followed in publications like Kirkus Reviews, The San Francisco Chronicle and The St. Petersburg Times, among others. The Library Journal chose it as one of their top First Novels in the October 1992 issue, which had the effect of delivering  A Thousand Bridges to public libraries all across America. The Associated Press sent a lengthy review out on its news wires titled A Thousand Bridges Bats 1,000.
     Then, the division of Walker Books that released the novel folded. Times change.
     But I believe this novel is as vital now as it was when it was first released. Kiki Olsen, a reviewer from Philadelphia, PA, wrote in a review published in the St. Petersburg Times Sunday edition, September 27th, 1992, that it was " an astoundingly articulate novel set in Florida..."
     She says of McDonald Clay, the protagonist,  "Mac is a supremely engaging hero. He is brave, honest, bold and begrudgingly romantic....The all-but-impossible mission McKinney sketched out for him is packed with action, desire, suspense and mystery.
     McKinney does a sensational job of putting his ‘it could happen here' story together, and much of his art lies in the economy of words. He is succinct and precise in moving the action and emotions, making it unnecessary for readers to slog through dreary, unnecessary descriptions."

     More reviews followed in The Times Picayune (New Orleans) and the Buffalo Times.  Jerome Sterns of NPR, writing in the Tallahassee Democrat, said A Thousand Bridges is a thriller with just enough resemblance to today's political weirdness to make it downright scary. The cast of villains are involved in the stuff of today's headlines. Dope dealing and arms deals that involve the very pillars of the community. Corruption wrapped in the cloth of high righteousness and the American flag. A avidity for power and money that violates all notions of decency. And most interesting of all, an impatient intolerance with the inconvenient people of America - "them," as Pat Buchanan put it in a recent speech."

     My mother, Lucy, instilled this love of words in me in such a way that it has remained a single, driving force in my life. I'm a sixth-generation Floridian, and love writing about the land that created me - the land I love.

     I'm a Vietnam era veteran who never had to fight, but I still hate the sound of helicopters. I was stationed at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle when I met Maggie. I worked on the flight line and she was leading the anti-war protests on the marina. It was love at first sight.  We've been together for a long, long time, and we spend our lives mostly as a singer/songwriter duo called "Lucky Mud". We've had the chance to play our original, lyric based music around the world, but Florida is still our home. We've played the main stages of the Florida Folk Festival and the Will McLean Festival, and tour the West of Ireland every year.  It's a heady thing to know our CDs are being played from Florida to Texas, from Ireland to Denmark. We've just now released our 8th CD on CD Baby, called Into the Night. Our son, Griffin, resides in Mountain View, California.