When I announced my West Coast tour last month, I know a lot of you were scratching your head. Alaska? Really? Some guessed my trip had something to do with Giving the Finger, and while I’ve been looking for a reason to come back to Alaska since my visit to Dutch Harbor in December of 2012, this trip has nothing to do with crab fishing or reality television.

So what brought me out here? About a year ago, a filmmaker named Tom Trainor reached out to me. Before going on a trip to shoot a TV series in the wilds of Alaska, he picked up a copy of Big Lonesome at Title Wave, a massive used book store in Anchorage, and became enamored with my short story “Kessler Has No Lucky Pants.” He wanted to know if the film rights were available. We talked for a bit, I gave him the green light, and he was off. 

When Forest of Fortune came out, Tom invited me to come up to Anchorage and do a reading and shoot a cameo for the film. How could I say no? On Sat. Sept 12 I read at Cafe del Mundo to an audience of the cafe’s patrons and staff, and Tom’s talented and amiable colleagues in the uber-collaborative Anchorage film community, including Beth Skabar, the film’s Director of Photography and Kevin T. Bennett, one of the lead actors.

If you are familiar with Kessler, you know it’s not the kind of story that screams “Make me into a movie.” Its question and answer format, i.e. a catechism, presents significant challenges for telling the story. I’ve seen clips and its astonishing. I can’t wait to see the finished product.

While I was getting ready for the reading, it occurred to me that Kessler, a beleaguered office temp is a proto-Pemberton, one of the protagonist’s of Forest of Fortune. There’s a clear line between Kessler the unlucky office worker and Pemberton the ad man whose bad decisions have boxed him into a corner. 

So what role will I play in the film? I don’t play any of the versions of “Jim” that appear in the story. That would be too meta. I wouldn’t even call it a role, more like a cameo. Like the kind Hitchcock was famous for, only creepier. Much creepier…. 

Be afraid. Be very afraid.