Kevin Rabas, associate professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program, joined with Mike Graves and Tracy Million Simmons to create and publish a book called “Green Bike,” which launched Sept. 6 at the Town Crier Bookstore, 716 Commercial St.
“The journey turned out to be one of the most enjoyable writing experiences I’ve ever had,” said Mike Graves, lecturer of Intensive English and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. “A road trip with no map and no plan is a great adventure. The three of us began with our own characters and our own stories, but as our stories developed, our characters’ paths crossed, and our stories intertwined.”
The three authors are part of a writer’s group that meets once a month. The idea originally started as an exercise to write together and learn from each other. They began writing stories and submitting them via a Facebook group page and it became an ongoing challenge.
“‘Green Bike’ is in some ways three stories in one,” Rabas said. “It’s a story about graduate assistants in English who are making their way in life and love. It’s a story about a high school woman who falls in love with a guy who is fixing up a bike for his mom who is dying of cancer, and it’s also a story about an English teacher who falls in love with a graduate student.”
Though there are three different plots, all of the love stories intertwine and all are love stories. Rabas wrote the part about the English graduate assistants, Graves wrote the story about the teacher who falls in love with the graduate student and Simmons wrote the sections about the high school student fixing up the bike in order to preserve his mother’s memory.
Simmons says she thinks of her part of the story as a sort of prequel to the other two.
“As we were writing, Mike and Kevin, their stories right away started kind of bouncing off of each other… I started writing my story with the green bike and just threw it out there before I realized how theirs was going to tie together,” Simmons said.
When brainstorming ideas, the writers knew from the beginning they were going to use a McGuffin, a plot device used to reach a common goal. They could write about anything, as long as the McGuffin was in it. They knew they were going to use a green bike, but they had no idea where the stories were going to go.
“It was fun having a group of your peers pushing you to move the story forward. So we all were there saying, ‘It’s your turn next, make it good,’” Rabas said.
The authors initially had planned to use a publisher with a branch in Kansas City, but over some differences they decided to split from them. Simmons has an independent publishing press of her own that they decided to use called Meadowlark. In the future, the publishing company would like to print books that focus on a Midwest regional appeal.