Wit Rules In Real-Life Fiction

For outdoor writer Alan Liere, there’s only a slight blur between real life and fiction.

Real life goes like this:

“How was your hunting trip?” the reporter asked.

“I lost my glasses; my dog ate my lunch, and I missed my only shot at a goose,” he said over the phone. “It was great.”

That’s right, “great.” Bum luck is Liere’s bread and butter. It’s no laughing matter if you get your limit and the dog doesn’t throw up in your partner’s lap.

Misfortune and misery are two of the three foundations for Liere’s supposedly fictitious stories. The other is wit.

You’ll find plenty of all three in his recently released book, “…and pandemonium rained…”

“Is this a hunting and fishing book?” Liere writes. “That and a lot more. It’s an accumulation of outdoor love stories in which no one gets hurt much and no one gets pregnant. Not even a little.”

This, his second book “embodies the illusory blend of truth, beauty and lunacy” that is Liere’s life.

Liere has been teaching English in the Mead School District for 27 years. But during a two-year hiatus, in which he earned a masters degree in non-fiction, he enrolled in a humor writing course by local author Patrick F. McManus.

“At first I wanted to be a typical outdoor writer and do where-to and how-to articles,” Liere said. “But you have to take pictures to do that. Photo editors said my photos were humorous. Unfortunately there’s no market for funny fuzzy photos. So I decided to give humor writing a try.”

While enrolled in McManus’s class, Liere sold and published his first two stories. Now he’s a regular humor columnist for Bass ‘n Gal, Wing and Shot and Wildfowl magazines.

Once a reader gets past the somewhat amateurish cover art, “…and pandemonium rained…” is a delightfully wide-ranging, omni-appealing collection of short essays. Liere is tender one moment and raunchy the next.

But he’s never handsome.

That’s a plus. Brad Pitt could never be this funny.

“And speaking of long underwear,” Liere writes, “I find the catalog ads for these garments particularly abasing. I always assumed longjohns were intentionally cut big for comfort. When I slip into a pair there is ample room in the crotch to store a sack lunch or a limit of quail.

“Where do advertisers in outdoor catalogs find male models who not only fill their underwear but make it look snug? I could never trust the endorsement of anyone who can wear his thermals snug without quail in them.”

And Brad Pitt probably isn’t this progressive:

“I used to say a man could tell if his wife loved him by whether or not she put lettuce on his sandwiches,” Liere writes.

“Later, I decided plain liverwurst was a fair indicator of love as long as the little woman didn’t complain too much as she made them. Lately, though, I’ve been making my own sandwiches and feeling fortunate to have finished my laundry in time to get in a few hours afield.”

And Brad Pitt probably doesn’t have an affinity for hunting dogs:

“Brit, my second dog, once ate $300 worth of sheepskin seat covers while my friend, Mark, and I had breakfast,” Liere writes. “Luckily for me, it was Mark’s car.”

Perhaps the wittiest of all Liere’s essays are the letters to various friends and family members.

But every essay begins with a bang and ends with a punch. God only knows what Liere could do if he wasn’t always looking for his glasses.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo