40-Year Run:
A Catalogue Raisonné of
Jack Saunders’ Stack
I'm not really breaking the genre, just bending it a bit.
Charles Willeford
Not only must each book have a design, but the whole output and sum of a writer’s life must have a design.
William Faulkner
See that seven books, from DIS HERE, will take me to 150. Outline series Odd Lot. See that 100 books, after that, will take me to 250. Envision the series Century as a book a month for 100 months.
Jack Saunders
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Copyright © 2010 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.
A list is heuristic.
You see gaps in them, or, as an autodidact calls gaps in a list, lacunae.
You see false starts and detours, cul-de-sacs.
You see an overall direction.
If you don’t like the direction you are heading you can change direction.
I didn’t set out to write a Collected Works. A great long continuous book of my life, as Thoreau said. I was going to write novels. Mystery novels.
Now, I see that the last book is connected to the first book in a straight, unbroken line. Well, a jagged, nonlinear line.
I see repetition.
I see fulgurating intuition.
I see grinding the work out, through thin and thin, for decades.
But overall I see, not victory, because the struggle isn’t over, but achievement, rather than the failure I might once have seen. And growth.
I didn’t quit, sell out, or turn bitter and I didn’t fall into a marketing groove and play licks.
I produced a body of work, my stack, and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting. Editing the list showed me this.
The first two milestones I documented were 30 years as a writer and 250 books.
The third was seeing that I am an anti-master, and am writing an anti-masterpiece, rather than a post-masterpiece. Anti- in the sense instead of, rather than against.
My stack is what I wrote in place of the masterpiece I might have written if my career had been different. If I had had the career I didn’t have.
I’m not making excuses and I’m not blaming anyone.
I wrote what I wrote.
I did the best I could with what I had.
I’ll let the results speak for themselves.
OVER THE TRANSOM. Give myself a year to learn to write, the last year of a postgraduate fellowship in anthropology at Tulane. Write a mystery, OUT IN THE OPEN, and send it out. Then a memoir about how I became a writer, what I thought I was doing in the first book. Then a dialogue between the lead character of the first book and myself. Not a very conventional start. The plug is out. The die is cast. The pattern is set. All subsequent books are variations on this method. I write, I send it out, I write about what happens to it, and how what happens makes me feel. What I do about how I feel. I write. I mix fiction, poetry, and the essay. Autobiography and literary criticism. I throw in filmscripts and plays. Grant applications and replies to rejection slips. Letters to a friend.
THE SOLID GOLD PECKERWOOD. A tour de force. A straight, naturalistic novel (with a murder in it) I wrote in six weeks. About digging on the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge, living out on Alligator Point.
I
REMEMBER YEATS. Digging the
slave quarters at an antebellum plantation in
THE
SHADE OF THE ASPIDISTRA. Move to
the mountains of
RACE,
SEX, AND LIBEL. The pamphlets Playing Hurt and Trailer Park
Tramp were printed up by Larry. A
section on the books in my life and a postscript are unpublished. I was working construction. Which meant we'd moved to
LOONY
TUNES. An essay. A summing up.
We hadn't moved back to
REJECTED POEMS. Poems written at the winemaking/cheese-making shop, Homecrafts; unemployed; working construction; unemployed; working as a carpenter's helper; unemployed; press brake operator trainee; unemployed; janitor, from which job I was fired for stealing six rolls of toilet paper and a gallon of floor wax.
THE
NINTH NOVEL. I can't find this
one anywhere. I don't remember the
title, and don't know how long it was. It
was written after we moved back to