Michael Byrne was born and raised in Henderson, Kentucky, certain he would grow up to write novels, which he loved to read. Instead, he trained as a Chinese and Vietnamese linguist with the U.S. Air Force and cycled through the Far East circuit before earning a master’s degree in journalism at Indiana University. He worked as a writer and editor for newspapers in Florida and Virginia before moving to Washington, D.C., to advocate for unions as editor of the AFL-CIO News and America@Work, and as an executive at two Washington public relations firms developing communications strategies and campaigns for labor, education and progressive political groups.
Byrne’s interest in Chinese language and culture led to a 33-year pursuit of the Taoist martial arts, particularly Tai Chi and qigong, healthful breathing and internal energy exercises. In 2016, he set out on a seven-state sojourn to meet Tai Chi and qigong masters, and to promote their arts in a blog, The New Dharma Bums. The Dharma Bums excursion gave way to The Return Trip, a first novel that mines the Jack Kerouac Dharma Bums story for a modern-day odyssey that resurrects the lost Beat spirit that Kerouac dropped off at Big Sur before drinking himself to death.
Ray James, a newspaper columnist, is on the road to unpack for his readers what the election of Donald Trump means, while being consumed with his own narcissistic impulses to get high and get off. He faces mounting health problems and deteriorating personal relationships, including with his daughter, a doctor whose mission is to save his life. Meanwhile, he learns someone may be trying to kill him. The Return Trip is a political mystery wrapped in a spiritual transformation, a tale of survival on both the personal and political levels.