C. Michael Byrne

I wish to thank all the readers who’ve followed my trek to explore the Taoist martial and healing arts, whimsically set against the backdrop of a long-ago literary search for cosmic Truth, Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Connecting the two was a vision I conjured up seven years ago, launching this blog with a Kickstarter campaign to fund a journey to meet Tai Chi masters and practitioners around the country and to tell the story. While my Kickstarter barely got off the ground, the story is very much alive, thanks to your encouragement and participation.

The Return Trip is the upshot of this blog, a new-age odyssey that picks up the wandering Beat spirit that Kerouac dropped off at Big Sur before drinking himself to death, extending the pursuit of dharma through the mind-body balance of Tai Chi, the supreme ultimate. As I wrote in April 2017, Kerouac’s sad demise of alcoholism at 47 led me to imagine “a Jack Kerouac who survived, even thrived, and was now telling stories of the Information Age – not Kerouac, per se, but an adventurous Beat spirit that infused a new Dharma Bums quest.”

In my novel, narrator Ray James is an “on-the-road” columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle who manages his nomadic job with shots of alcohol and psychotropic drugs while prowling nightclubs for sexual stimulation and release – a Kerouac character on steroids at a crossroads in his life and times. The novel begins in a hung-over haze the morning after Donald J. Trump was elected president, and Ray scrambling to figure out how to tell the story.

At the same time, he is challenged by an old college friend, a poet and China scholar, to walk away from the deadline pressure and join him at his mountain retreat in Colorado. For Ray, the invitation is irresistible, particularly after a series of health scares and under orders from his daughter, an emergency room physician, to straighten out his life.

The modern-day Dharma Bums journey that follows alternately swings from Ray’s reporting on the brave new world of Trump America, to his personal struggles with addiction and relationships, and to his pursuit of wellness through internal energy work and meditation. He also learns that someone may be trying to kill him as his trip is embroiled in political intrigue linked to his reporting.

While born of my curiosity, this is a story cultivated by discussions with Taoist martial and healing arts experts around the country – and with many others of you, dear readers, who’ve weighed in on the issues and techniques I’ve covered in this blog. Whether stoking the conversation or just taking it in, you are my collaborators, ultimately. Your interest and queries kept me engaged in the writing.

Many of you are expert in Taoist martial arts, Chinese healing arts, qigong and meditation. Others share my interest in the literature and history of the Beat generation, the counterculture and American society. Some are newshounds such as myself, who carefully parse the daily news for signs of hope, and danger. And others are experts with the language – writers and editors with whom I’ve worked over many years. Some are family, who love me and want me to succeed. Thank you for your friendship and your curiosity about my project. You’re all acknowledged generally in my book, some by name.

I invite you to stay with my journey on The Return Trip, fictional adventures that draw from Chinese internal energy practices to guide a lost soul during an extraordinary moment in American history. The novel is available in ebook, paperback or hardcover via Amazon. The blog goes on.