S.M.Fernand
represented by Melissa Lee
On Born to French-Canadians, Fernand grew up in a factory town in central Massachusetts. In his early twenties, influenced by Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan, he wandered up and down the East Coast, a sporadic troubador in cities—financed mainly by seasonal work in carnival games. Quitting the midway, his creative interests shifted from song to prose, and he began to read hungrily.
On the island of St.Thomas, he found work with a sandal maker, and met the mother of his two daughters. Returning stateside to Reagan’s recession—faced with necessity being the mother of invention—Fernand designed his own line of handmade footwear, a hit with alternative types, and eventually he set up shop and bought a house in a village near Traverse City, Michigan.
Intermittently firing up his idea for a trilogy, he’d write a scene or two. One winter fortnight, he went at it to try to make some headway—easily writing fifty pages, and very much enjoying it. Though having scarce time just then, he knew that one day he’d write a book.
After selling his business in 2006, he sat down in April in the South of France and wrote a thousand words a day. Finding that if he got out of town then more writing would get done, he twice rented sublets in Northampton, and finished the first draft. A dozen rewrites later—having honed his skills aided by a shelf of how-to books—Fernand has signed Appalachian Carnival with the Sullivan Maxx Literary Agency.
He now spends summers in Northern Michigan and winters in St.Petersburg, Florida, where he plays an occasional musical gig, and works on his trilogy—
Appalachian Carnival
May Day, 1970, Annabelle Cory—a comely nineteen-year-old, disheartened with her West Virginia coal-town prospects—flirts with Walt Ryder, who runs a game in a carnival, and wins a date after the show closes. Abandoning all caution for a shot at adventure and romance, she goes with him to his hotel bed, and the next night leaves home with Walt and the carnival.
Narrating her tale of the following week, Annabelle’s voice is laced with hillbilly dialect and carny jargon, and woven with language begotten from her love of reading. Her love for Walt takes wing amid blind lust, spiraling in and out of her confused heart while she follows him through the day-to-day world of McCain’s Magic Midway. Having won Annabelle, Walt seeks another prize—money—but at what price?
Appalachian Carnival documents a time when carnies were in cahoots with the local law, a time when psychedelics were taken for trips inward. Within each chapter/day, Fernand explores aspects of a Tarot card’s symbolism—and thus the tale becomes an allegory of archetypes. Annabelle, seeking her liberation amid a caravan of devils, rolls the dice to win a ride on the wheel of fortune, and finds herself awakening within the soul of all.
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