The Eagle Flies Again

It’s the Game of Thrones … The Sopranos … Breaking Bad … The Wire phenomenon. Get hooked on a compelling story, and you can’t stop.
    Same with novels.
    Since the 19th century, newspapers and magazines have made hay on that addiction. Like fans lined up to buy each new Harry Potter book, readers pushed and shoved to buy, by installment, novels by the likes of Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories meant wealth for The Strand magazine.
    Fast-forward to 1994, when New Bay Times~Weekly readers had Eli Flam’s Alex and the Eagle week by week in 25 installments from July through December.
    Once a serial is complete, the next step is a compilation for binge-watching or reading.
    Following suit, Flam has reissued Alex and the Eagle in stand-alone form, in a print Amazon edition.

What Drove Us to It?
    Why not? We were young, our paper only in its second year and only 33 issues old when Alex and the Eagle debuted. Novelty was standard practice, as we experimented to see what readers — and what we — liked. Flam appealed to us as a former journalist and active cultivator of the Southern Maryland literary scene. Sealing the deal: We were “the paper committed to the Chesapeake,” and his story had an environmental theme: the consequences of the shooting of a bald eagle.
    And, with a serial, we’d be continuing a beloved tradition.
    Early Bay Weekly collaborator Sonia Linebaugh solicited drawings from her niece, Kerry Culbertson, just graduated from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Chapter 1, After School, appeared on July 7, 1994.
    Neither Flam nor I knew how it would end.
    “You printed a majority of the weekly installments before I’d finished,” he confessed this year.

What Drove Flam to It?
    Flam’s novel was born in coincidence. He’d read a news brief in a Charles County weekly. “The imagined scene of the wounded eagle and the boy deeply troubled by the shooting stayed with me,” Flam explained. “So I had to try to make sense of it.”
    Making sense led to Alex and the Eagle.
    “Your support,” he told me this year, “led me to write most of the story in a stretch.”    
    The story ended on December 22, 1994. For 20 years, it lay embedded in yellowing issues of Bay Weekly’s Volume II. Perhaps in readers’ memories. Certainly in Flam’s.
    Like his novel, Flam was getting older. Last year the idea of putting Alex and the Eagle in book form resurfaced and a technically adept friend, Irv Salzberg, guided Flam “through a low-budget, do-it-yourself Amazon approach.”
    Meanwhile, Flam continues writing and reworking old novels and poetry and writing for community papers, most recently the Greenbelt News Review.

What Drove Alex to It?
    In short, teenage angst. A Generation Xer displaced from his Florida hometown — with friends and ocean in biking distance — to the long, lonely distances of Southern Maryland, Alex feels abandoned. With his parents seemingly always away at work, he wanders the woods with his dog, his father’s liberated shotgun and the false courage of purloined whiskey. A potshot at an eagle leaves two creatures struggling for recovery.
    Flam calls his book a family novel. Teen readers will find company in it; adult readers understanding. Find it at www.amazon.com/Alex-Eagle-Eli-Flam/dp/1511661232.

(Note: Alex of the story is in no way modeled after Bay Weekly general manager and co-founder Alex Knoll).