JAMIE SIMS COAKLEY
The Official Site
MY MOST RECENT WORK
FREEHAND 2173
Book Launch Recap!
What a wonderful experience it's been! Thank you to everyone who bought the book & supported me in so many ways!
FREEHAND 2173 is a fast paced, cinematic novel that weaves together Los Angeles's stunning scientific history with a climate-crisis induced dystopian future. Reporter Dorothy Holiday is struggling to survive despite insurmountable odds when she meets astrophysicist Thomas O'Connell. Their friendship helps her rediscover her resilient, brave heart and challenges her to try to help save what's left of humanity. This passionate, entertaining and inspiring tale asks us to imagine what's possible when the best in humanity works together to overcome the worst in humanity.
About Me? I am a storyteller.
I spent my early childhood years living alongside the Buffalo River in Northwest Arkansas without television or neighbors. Those long, formative hours spent exploring the wild river and peaceful forests which surrounded it, set in motion a way of looking at the world that would later inform me as a storyteller. Alone in nature early in life, and then moving frequently throughout my adolescence, I cultivated my writer’s sensibilities, carefully observing everything about the world around me and the people who populated it. When I was twelve years old, my aunt gave me a journal with the gentle instructions to “write about it” and I have been writing about it, ever since. As a multidisciplinary artist, writing has taken many forms over the years: as music, movies, mixed media art projects, and now, novels. Regardless of the form it takes, my underlying desire is always to connect with and inspire others through my storytelling.
Mediums
2019-Present
The Written Word
Storytelling is my passion and writing is my first love. From commissioned 100 words stories and poems, to full length novels, the last five years have found me utterly and blissfully lost in the world of words. You can purchase your own copy of my debut time travel novel HERE.
2014-2018
Filmmaking
Somewhere in my late 20's, I got into filmmaking and directing, working various side gigs as a PA on productions and learning what I could while making music videos, viral videos and a short film for my band WAXAPPLES. Then in 2014, I was given the opportunity to make and direct a feature documentary film for the popular Orange County punk band, the Cadillac Tramps, which we called "Life On The Edge" and which ultimately became a heart warming and bittersweet tale of addiction, redemption, brotherhood and kick ass rock and roll. It was originally distributed by GunPowerSky/Filmbuff and is now available to rent or buy from me directly on Vimeo. Since then I have continued to make music videos, experimental shorts, and "mini-docs" on people who inspire me in an effort to inspire you! You can watch them all HERE. (Make sure to click "Videos" button on Vimeo.)
1999-2011
Music
Albums available everywhere you get your music.
There are so many wonderful ways to tell a story and one of my favorites, songwriting is literally in my blood. My great grandmother was a published songwriter scandalously playing piano in bars in the 1910's and 20's and she even had a band in old age that played out locally and was know as "The Grandma Band". As a child we never had a television, but we always had a radio and some of my fondest memories are listening to Casey Kasem on America's Top 40, with my big sister, Stacy. In my mid-twenties, I started playing in a band called WAXAPPLES and enjoyed modest success on an indie level. I am proud to say we released three full length albums on our own record label, Nadine Records, my first experiences with art direction and tackling big creative projects started there. Next I dabbled in mixed media with an art project called Intersecting(LA) that was based on the idea that LA was a million different cities depending on which intersection you happened to find yourself at. It included video, photography and a song for each of 10 different intersections, for which we release an album under the same name of Intersecting(LA) "LA Woman". Most recently, as a solo artist, I covered Harry Styles "Sign Of The Times", with Derek O'Brien, Frank Agnew, Brian Coakley, and Warren Renfrow, as promotion for my debut time travel novel "FREEHAND 2173" and I am so proud of how it turned out. Although my focus these days is on novel writing, music and songwriting will always be a big part of who I am and how I find inspiration. Click the album covers to listen in Apple Music. All music available everywhere you listen to music.
Howling Coyotes
Childhood memories are like pages dog eared, only part of the story. Warm strawberries picked fresh from the vine, sweet on your tongue. Summer waters singing low across algae’d river bottoms. Howling coyotes, distant through the trees at sunset. Picturesque as these snapshots may be, they are incomplete stories. Childhood is full of golden hour drenched images juxtaposed with things less easy to understand. Messy, chaotic, unnatural, human things. Weaknesses. Backbeats. Violence. Regrets. Lack. Loss, and sorrow. It is among all of these things where my world was birthed. Among the valleys of nature clashing with the mountains of man. Here is where I would learn and unlearn what it means to be human. All powerful and full of vulnerability. Part of and separate from everything. Fires burning, torrential downpours drenching our duality manifest. Ask me why I write? Why I tell stories? What good is all the trouble? To write is to try as best one might, through meticulous observation, to remember truths known and forgotten. Seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, grasping for the knowledge swept away with a wave of man’s hand and a whisper on the autumn breeze.
