Authors Supporting Authors: Anker Frankoni

I was a little worried when I woke up this morning because I knew I needed to post something on my blog but I didn't know what!  Then to my surprise, when I opened up my inbox, Ankar's e-mail was waiting for me.  Ankar and I have been trying to have this interview since July but with his schedule and my schedule - well, at least we were FINALLY able to interview!  Just a little warning:  There is so profanity in this interview so definitely not for little eyes to read.  :)  I hope you enjoy meeting Anker as much as I did!


What is your name? 
Anker Frankoni

Where are you from? 
North America

What genre are you in?
Literary Fiction

Please list your books and the year of publication.
“Mexican Eskimo Book 1: Exmikan”
2014

Why are you an Author?
This isn't an easy question to answer, but since so much of "Mexican Eskimo" is about facing Truth, I'll be frank.
The impetus to begin writing came about gradually, and not necessarily by choice. It was the result of internal conflicts that began during an intense period of self-analysis and research into the side of my family that I never really knew growing up, as I attempted to answer the very difficult question that exploded into my reality in June of 2004: "Why the hell did my mother shoot herself — didn't she have everything??"

The crush of emotions that followed eventually settled into analytical thoughts. Soon after, those began expressing themselves as scraps of notes, pieced together from my memories and the pieces of her own writing that Anne left behind. It wasn't long before the notes became passages, compiled page after page as my discoveries continued.

Before long, I received the instruction (from myself, and signals originating far outside my head, the source of which I still do not entirely understand) that I was to write a book.  The end result of this process is the first release of a planned trilogy, "Mexican Eskimo", which in many ways is simply a story about growing up. It's also a love story about finding trust and hope amidst generations of anger and neglect, suicide and substance abuse. It's a trip through the dark which ends up in the light however, and ultimately a joyful statement about something I'd like to share with anyone forced to grapple with the pain and stigma of abuse in their family's history: the violation of innocence creates broken families and damaged people. Those who are thrust into the middle of such cycles have a hard time breaking the chain and creating new positive family stories, but with love, patience, and the willingness to look beyond the blame and anger that many
of us rightly feel towards the people we come from, and hold a mirror up to our own faces, it can be done!

What inspires you?
While living in Mexico in 2009, I was driving alone back from Texas to my wife and kids in San Miguel de Allende. On a long stretch of highway over the Altiplano, some ways north of the border between the states of San Luis Potosí and Guanajuato, I narrowly missed being involved in a deadly accident. A truck overloaded with livestock traveling in the opposite direction careened suddenly across the center divide, flashed across my line of travel no more than ten meters in front of my Jeep, and slammed into a small car in the lane directly next to me. It was one of those experiences where the seconds stretch like hot taffy across the movie-screen of one’s mind: five years later, I have only to close my eyes for a second to bid the visual effects return, and instantly conjure up the slow-motion horror of the old campesino slumped over the steering wheel from the heart-attack or stroke that sent his truck and its fated cargo flying past my windshield;
the pulsating pupils in the eyes of the lone goat who stuck its head through the side-rails to marvel at the last instants before her demise, blazing with an unnatural distortion, like one of the artist Marcos Byrd’s otherworldly stallions.

That incident created a watershed moment for me, and a complete 180-degree shift in a basic mindset I’d held during my entire adult life — for up until then my thoughts of the future had always focused on trying to answer the question, “Where do I want to live?”

I pulled over onto the shoulder, gripping the steering wheel so firmly in the shock that my knuckles shone white as bone. Squinting into the side-view mirror at the flames rising from the wreckage a hundred meters or so behind me, I knew without a doubt that neither driver had survived their dance with death on Mexico’s highway that day.  Managing to loose my hand’s near-deadfast grip on the wheel, I reached with my trembling right arm to pull the one open bottle from the case of Bulleit Bourbon carefully cushioned in the center of the passenger-side floor: one of the spoils of my trip to Texas
—like the two ten-pound bags of lemons—to be savored in the shaded courtyard of our beautiful home in the lovely little city in which we’d been settled for three months, and where the only thing I’d found to complain of was its nearly complete ignorance of stiff liquid delights beyond tequila and lime.

I’d left every bottle of the precious frontier whisky responsibly unopened all the way from Austin, down the long chute of Texas tarmac in the DUI danger-zones of my own country, through the last paranoia-inducing strip of the constantly nervous streets of Laredo leading onto the bridge over the big river, and through the Mexican customs checkpoint. It was only after clearing the immigration counter on the south-side of the Rio Grande and receiving my temporary vehicle import tag for the Jeep’s windshield, then driving out onto the smooth open expanse of the toll-road heading south out of the congested streets of Nuevo Laredo towards Matehuala, where I’d overnight to break up the drive, that I leaned over and yanked the box flap loose on the case of Bulleit and pulled out a bottle. I tucked it between my thighs and cracked the cap, then took a swig to wash down the huge sigh of relief I breathed at the now familiar feeling of freedom that I’d begun to associate with removing myself from the United States once more. 

To celebrate my first full day back in Mexico the next morning, I splashed another rich shot of the liquor into my morning coffee while I breakfasted poolside before leaving the deliciously kitsch Las Palmas Inn to complete the final five hours of travel down highway 57 to San Miguel. Neither of these pleasant recollections about the first few fingers of the bourbon entered the least layers of my consciousness as I sat clutching the bottle and staring at the distant flames dancing in the mirror. I drank only to steady my resolve with a fresh coat of whisky-breath, thereby sealing the requirement that I follow the one clear thought in my mind at that moment: “Nothing good can come of me waiting around to tell the Federales about this mess.” The dead had mingled their fates with one another — I drove on, following mine down the otherwise empty ribbon of concrete threading its way down the spine of that high arid plateau.

For nearly an hour I continued in an almost hallucinatory bubble of stunned silence. My meditation was suddenly shattered by a deep voice, and I flinched in surprise as the words rang out as clearly as if a passenger hiding in my backseat abruptly spoke aloud. I flashed a glance into the rearview mirror, then grabbed it and angled it down for a view
of the empty seat behind me, as the words the presence had uttered so clearly into the back of my head reverberated through my skull: “Where do you want to die?”

A dreadful sense of panic began percolating up my spine as I imagined what vengeful ghost had pursued me from the accident scene I’d just fled, and I fought to keep the Jeep on track as I accelerated dangerously into a steep banking descent carved through a rocky corridor in the ancient altiplano dividing the two chains of the Sierra Madre mountains.

As the road leveled back out of the cut-through in the rough granite outcropping, it was the Madre most associated with Mexico who I think saved me, for every physical impulse demanded that I turn around to search the empty back seat for the specter which had just spoken so clearly, and I would have done so at great peril of joining the dead men I’d left behind, had the Virgin herself not suddenly appeared before me.

A beautiful Descanso, or roadside shrine marking a spot on the highway where another traveler found their final rest on that stretch of desolate Mexican highway suddenly appeared before me, drawing my attention like a beacon to a safe place to pull over and collect myself. I parked in the dirt and walked over to the low arched construction of brightly-painted bricks sheltering a statue of the Virgin Mary, the floor and walls of her tiny temple covered in silk flowers and pictures of the deceased. I relaxed and breathed a cleansing sigh as she stretched her lovely white arms from the folds of her azure robe as if to embrace and protect me, but suddenly the voice boomed out as if directly behind me again: “Where do you want to die?!”

Whirling around to confront the empty space behind me, the sudden thump of my heart and the shock of finding myself alone sent my head reeling as I spun again in search of it. I stumbled forward, catching my fall only by Mary’s grace, and the low brick roof of her sturdy shrine. With my arms stretched like a supplicant before me, I raised my head and saw then for the first time that I’d reached the last major marker of my long drive to San Miguel de Allende. Not two hundred yards down the highway, the big green sign marking the state-line and entry to Guanajuato stretched like a flag of deliverance over the roadway with a proud flourish, and a warm welcome: “GTO ¡Bienvenidos! Tierra de historia, tradiciones y valores” (Welcome to Guanajuato! Land of history, tradition and values).

For a long time afterwards I imagined the epiphany was instantaneous, but I know now some rapid reflections were involved. I pondered my own birth-state’s motto, “Eureka... I have found it!” and its reference to the discovery of gold in California. Was it that manic modern version of chasing Silicon Valley gold that drove me out? What of my own
history, and the seemingly unquenchable grief that dogged me there, and the constant gnawing questions about what led my mother to put a bullet through her heart, despite the fact that she’d laid claim to such a large pile of that gold? And for my values? Who was I, and what kind of a man had California turned me into — one who would drive away from the scene of an accident where bodies lie burning, and I the only witness?!

Panic, now mixed with self-loathing squeezed my heart, and I squeezed my eyes shut tight in an attempt to blot out the dreadful thoughts about my present, my past... my self. And then again the voice rang out! But not to challenge; not to goad or terrify. When it spoke again I received perhaps the only message of faith and the possibility of redemption that one such as I could truly latch onto — I who had lived too blindly for too long through that mad rush for gold and selfish pleasures; shallow substitutes for the true treasures of self-discovery, honor, and upholding values: “It is never too late to
become what you might have been,” the voice told me, and I knew in an instant that regardless of its source, I had just received a great truth.

With my arms still stretched out over the roof of the Marian shrine, and my head now bowed in thanks, I at first spoke my answer in a bare whisper. Then as the thanks blossomed into joy, and the relief turned into a flood of electrically-charged excitement, I flung myself up from the roof of the shrine, hands now outstretched to the heavens and all that lay before me, and shouted as loud as any gold digger ever to strike a bonanza:

“¡Guanajuato!” Then falling to my knees in front of the Virgin Mary, I prayed with the kind of fervor seen only in those who have just discovered that they still have something to believe in, and pleaded aloud to her and any other higher power that may have been listening in: “Mother Mary! Jesus, Siddhartha and all Spirits that control my luck or lack of it, help me to become what I might have been! And if I must strive beyond the limits of this life’s allotment to be it, God give me a head start on the next try! Set my course for rebirth in a land of history, tradition, and values — let me die in Guanajuato!” These last words I cried out as I stretched my arm towards the sign marking the otherwise invisible border dividing the two states, and as I realized how near I was to crossing it, a sudden twinge of worry flashed through my mind as I thought for a second of the special attraction that Irony seemed always to have towards me.

Suddenly fearing that Fate’s finely tuned sense of humor might get a big kick out of the swiftest possible fulfillment of my prayer, I turned again to the merciful Mother Mary with a hasty postscript: “But not just yet! Jesus! Shit not yet! Let me first write something to make this all worthwhile... let me write something worthy of leaving behind!” And then— as long as I had everyone’s attention on the side of that empty road—threw in the extra gimme: “And a hole-in-one! Just once, you guys, just once; let me see the ball fly from my clubface and drop in the hole without touching the surface of this crazy-mad mass of spinning dirt, to bend Time, Space, and the curvature of this blessed Earth to my will for one fleeting instant of pure meaningless glory!”

So.... What drives me? The vision of a few last years, months, or days spent leading up to my eventual death in Guanajuato, Mexico—land of History, Tradition, and Values—and the promise I made to iconic and spiritual forces much greater than myself to strive to create something excellent, and achieve something near impossible; I’m still swinging for the stars.

Where and what times during the day do you work best?
The finished surfaces of my writing are quilts stitched together from what I call ‘snippets and shards.’ The seeds which grew into the first book in the “Mexican Eskimo” trilogy were literally planted on the backs of matchbooks and scraps of torn up envelopes hastily pulled from the garbage can under my day-job desk to catch the puzzle-pieces as they flitted through my head. Today I work with a custom-designed database accessible from any electronic device. If I wake up at 3:00 AM with the answer to a question that the writing has posed to me, or a new question for the writing to draw
myself further into it, I grab my phone and launch the QuickBase app, commit the thought to the cloud, and click save. 

In the morning when I sit down at my computer I arrange the new scraps by connecting them in plot-line-order to the pertinent section or chapter of the book they relate to. When enough of the raw details are sifted and sorted to fill the little mechanical bobbing-bird’s head dipping up and down in my brain to spill the latest set of beans from its beak into something resembling order, it comes out where and when it will, and the only tools I need to capture the result is this computer and a power-source, a set of headphones so I can drown out any noise around me with Billy Blanco’s “Dharma Flamenco” albums or the incredible sounds channeled from our ancestors by Xavier Quijas Yxayotl... and this pack of matches. And my thermos... oh and, the ashtray. And the remote control, and, well — the paddle ball... and this lamp.

Yeah, the computer, my power-source, the Billy Blanco, and the ashtray, this paddle game, and the... remote control, and the lamp! And that's all I need too! I don't need one other thing, not one... I don’t even need my dog.

Who is your target audience?
If you think that some of the greatest truths shared in the collective human consciousness come from fiction; if you don’t believe you’ve found a religion that speaks to your individual sense of all that “God” is, but wonder at the fact that every established religion ever documented has an afterlife or rebirth component and wonder if you’d like to create your own regulation-free plan for just such a probability... if you’ve ever brushed up against something called “regret,” and then realized it’s better to regret something ya have done, than something ya haven’t done... if you appreciate genrebending
literature and magical realism, have ever thought that an animal has communicated with your soul, and don't mind having to poke through the dark underbelly of human-animal-nature to find the light of hope and healing promised at the
end of a difficult emotional journey, well then — you are my target audience.

How do you want your readers to feel as they read your book?
I want readers to feel that they’ve somehow taken a deeper look at their own lives and how they want to live the rest of it as a result of taking a peek into mine.

What is one piece of advice you would give aspiring authors?
Begin by shaping the story in the best way you know how. When it starts to shape you, keep writing, get out of the way, and let the creativity work its magic. You will become something you never dreamed possible.

Share one thing about yourself that you would like readers to know.
I sing in the shower... as well as at funerals, book-signings, and in the few sections of the Audible audiobook version of “Mexican Eskimo” where I just couldn’t help myself!

On your website, you have a Character Gallery. Can you explain what that is?
This is a little electronic Descanso if you will: a random shrine on the shoulder of the Internet highway to remember my dead, and a reminder of who I came from and the road I want to walk while I commemorate some of those who went before me, and some whose spirits I’m still working to exorcise from my soul.

Are you currently working on another book?
Yes. Now that “Mexican Eskimo Book 1: Exmikan” has gained a bit of traction online, and has just started finding shelf-space at Indie book stores thanks to a distribution deal with PartnersWest this month, I’m hard at work on the second release in my planned trilogy: "Mexican Eskimo Book 2: Octopus Asylum", which begins....

"We didn't get to make love that morning. It was to be Gia's birthday fuck. A present she was reluctant to either give or receive, having born our third child only 14 days earlier; but she knew it had to happen: one doesn't just blow off the birthday fuck. That was one of the things that first caused me to fall in love with Gia: she said, "What other day can a
pussy draw you so far into the infinite?" and insisted that I should have my birthday fuck just three nights after we met. A seven year ritual between us by then, which started as the sly reminiscence of an inside joke for the first few years, but evolved into something that each of us felt as superstitious about as a chain letter — silly, we knew, but both loath to break it lest some bad bit of luck result... little did we know the curses that would befall our love."

But I'm getting ahead of myself! "Octopus Asylum" is scheduled for release in mid to late 2015... plenty of time for you to read "Mexican Eskimo Book 1: Exmikan" which is available now in print, Kindle, and audiobook formats at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JY8SXBW

How do you balance marketing and writing?
The same way I balance my day-job, sideline business number two, three children, two dogs, and not enough cash left at the end of the winter months to pay someone else to shovel the snow off my driveway: I eat only when I’m hungry, and sleep only when I’m very, very.... Zzzzzzzz.