Hypertext Magazine asked Terry Tierney, author of The Bridge of Beer River, “You have said your first novel Lucky Ride was based in part on your experiences of hitchhiking across the country in the Vietnam era. Is The Bridge on Beer River autobiographical?”
By Terry Tierney
I drew on my experience of living in Binghamton, New York to create the characters and scenes in The Bridge on Beer River, but the novel is much less autobiographical than Lucky Ride. When I first moved to Binghamton after my discharge from the military, I struggled to make ends meet, and I was eventually fortunate to find a steady job, unlike Curt and most of his friends and acquaintances in the novel. My time of living on the edge, however, informs the themes of the novel and many of the assumptions the characters carry with them.
Although Curt is a first-person narrator and he expresses some of my attitudes toward establishment figures, he is not me, and the other characters are similarly invented. In creating Curt, I envisioned a narrator who the other characters would appeal to for help, which puts him in an ideal position to tell their stories. Because of his physical strength, everyone assumes he was born for manual labor, but he wants to use his mind, even though he can’t abide sitting in a classroom, something I typically enjoy. Curt also has a quiet and protective personality that his friends find reassuring and his enemies threatening. In the first scene of the novel, for example, Curt’s landlady finds him easily approachable, not wearing the protective armor of masculinity, which is one of his traits I try to emulate. But I am hardly a force of nature like Curt.
The workplace problems and mind-numbing anxiety about paying bills and retaining a place to live that Curt and the other characters encounter also echo my experience, but the scenes are invented. I never worked in a dairy, nor have I frequented a dive bar like My Mother’s Place, but I admit that Genesee Ale was my beer of choice when I lived in Binghamton. Although I created the musty bar and most of the landmarks of Curt’s journey, you can find similar dives in other rust belt towns where Curt and his friends would feel at home. If you order a pitcher, some of them might appear by your shoulder.
Terry Tierney was born in South Dakota and raised in Minneapolis and Cleveland. After serving in the Seabees, he received a BA and MA in English from SUNY Binghamton, and a PhD in Victorian Literature from Emory University. He taught college composition and creative writing and later survived a series of Silicon Valley startups as a software engineering manager. His stories and poems have appeared in over seventy literary journals, including Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dreams, Rust + Moth, Typishly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Lake, Third Wednesday, Puerto del Sol, and Poetry Northwest. He is the author of the Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry collection, The Poet’s Garage, and the novel Lucky Ride. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.