Encounters With Old Coyote by Laura Koerber

“I don’t understand why I’m a ghost,” Andrea said.

Welcome to the October 14th stop on the blog tour for Encounters With Old Coyote by Laura Koerber with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

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About the Book

Encounters With Old Coyote
by Laura Koerber

Published 21 June 2023

Genre: Magical Realism
Page Count: 68
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

“One thing about people—they need to tell stories. They can’t stop themselves. Stories all the time. That’s how they understand things.” So said Coyote to Andrea, shortly after she died. Andrea had never believed in any kind of afterlife or gods, so she was surprised to find herself still somewhat alive, floating in the form of a ghost in the soft, dry desert air of Nevada. She was even more surprised to meet a supernatural being with a coyote’s face, antlers, and the supplies for making coffee.

“I don’t understand why I’m a ghost,” Andrea said.

Coyote set his coffee cup down on the dirt beside his rock. He glanced at Andrea, grimaced, and said, “Okay, I’ll try to explain. Since you humans like stories, I’ll try to explain that way. I’ll tell you some stories.”

So come along with Coyote and Andrea as they share stories about life and death, spiders in the bathroom and how Andrea lost her bra at a truck stop, enemy gods and pottery shards, adventures in vomit, what scientists say about dark matter and the fifth force, and other topics both sublime and ridiculous.

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Excerpt

Though superficially gray, the desert was composed of a palette of light tints of purple and blue for shadows, silver layers over bronze for the distant mountains, and fine mists of gold, lemon, and yellow for the grass. Andrea could see a sheen of mint green in the small dry leaves of the scrubby bushes. The bushes were probably very old, she thought. Their stems were twisted and grooved, like ancient bent up old women. Between the shrubs, the sand was pinkish in places and in other places almost lavender. She was startled by the sight of a small white flower.

“Sego lily,” Coyote said.

“It’s lovely.” Beauty in the small things. Is there a story in that? Beauty had a way of shaking a person up. Come to think of it, she’d spent a lot of her life looking for ways to get shaken up, sometimes by beauty and sometimes by something else.

“When I was a teenager we used to joke that someday we would tell our grandchildren about the things we did. We thought we were so rebellious, you know. Well, we were in a way. It was the sixties and seventies and a whole lot of shaking was going on. The war, the Civil Rights movement, all that. The whole US was getting shaken up. But we were middle class white kids living in a small college town in Iowa, so mostly our adventures were just getting stoned. Getting high.” She shrugged.

“So you got any stories for your grandkids?”

“I don’t have any. Grand kids, I mean. I guess I have some stories.”

About the Author

I live on a island in the Puget Sound with my husband and my dogs. I am a retired teacher, presently doing in -home care for disabled people while volunteering at a cat rescue

My degree is in art, and I am a painter, graphic artist, and ceramic sculptor. The writing started about five years ago, a surprise to me and everyone who knows me, since I had never written anything before. To my immense gratitude, my first book received outstanding reviews and made the Kirkus Review list of one hundred best indy books of 2015.

Since then, I have written ten books. People seem to like them; I get lots of four and five star reviews. My books are a bit unconventional; I mix magical realism with dystopia in many of them. My stories tend to be character-driven and include ghosts and spirits.

I think I learned to write by reading. I am a voracious omnivore of books.

Giveaway Alert!

The author will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.

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