User:Mikael L Covey/sandbox

Mikael Covey is an American fiction writer and founding editor of Lit Up Magazine (2008-2014). His published works include two novels, and numerous online short stories, poems, reviews, and opinion pieces. His first novel, Out There, published by Andromache Books in 2009, is in the tradition of autobiographical fiction pioneered by John Fante and Jack Kerouac, and reemerging in the early 21st century through the works of noted authors such as Joseph Ridgwell and Tony O’Neill.

Out There chronicles the influence of the drug culture and Hippie movement on young people in America as US soldiers are returning home from the Vietnam War. But rather than a clash of beliefs and morals, Covey describes this as one big party that never seemed to end, migrating from one locale to the next, as peaceful and natural as a herd of buffalo moving across the wild wide-open prairie. Essential to this underground culture is the constant haze of marijuana, rock n roll music, and an almost religious attendance at concerts performed by the likes of Alice Cooper, Lynard Skynyrd, ZZ Top, Aerosmith, and countless others of that era.

The story begins in a quiet little Midwestern town where constancy is the norm, then rushes westward to the great golden dreams of the California coast; where sunny beaches, streets lined with Palms trees and tanned-skinned girls await with open arms...or not. And even the hopes and dreams of unbounded youth must face a constant struggle against the dim truth of unrelenting reality. ''Like escaping to an oasis, a head shop filled with beads and sweet burning incense, then walking out onto a cold snowy sidewalk and a sunless winter afternoon… But it was wild, sort of, amidst all the hussle and bussle of older meaningless people in their older meaningless world. And this is what it’s like to never grow up and never grow old.''

His second novel, Princessa, continues the theme of a world seen through the eyes of youth, and the ideals of innocence. But here the conflict is thrust into the political arena of global oil, the powers that be, and those who take up arms against. This story details the gambit of an aging monarch who dares to defy an almighty President; and the one-on-one battles between cold-blooded agents and a rag tag army of true believers fighting for the survival of their tiny country.

It’s a fictional account of what might have happened with a happy-go-lucky fool in the White House and power-mad Vice President pulling all the strings to amass incredible wealth off the plunder of senseless wars. While the others, the little people who die in these senseless wars, fight back with any means theycan muster. As the author puts it ''sometimes the terrorists are just those who can’t fight fair. The odds are too much against them. What would you do, if it was your country, and your people…govelling under the boot.''

Covey was born in the genteel, though segregated, South, in the old city of Athens, Georgia. He later grew up in rural Nebraska, and now resides with his children somewhere in Dakota Territory. He is the son of nostalic-humor writer, Dr. Arthur Covey, and grandson of Canadian pioneer Dr. William Covey.