Family
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost, “The Death of the Handyman”
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Copyright © 2009 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.
Introduction
Friday, January 1
Joe Spieler
Joe Spieler
The Spieler Agency
27 W. 20th St., Rm. 305
Dear Joe Spieler:
WAKE UP: CHRISTMAS IN PARKER is a book about combining writing, work, and family, for 38 years. I end up at my wife’s old home place in Parker, Florida, a suburb of Panama City, out of work, no publisher, not much money, and not many resources. We see our kids and grandchildren at our younger son’s wife’s beach house in Grayton Beach. Our sons are both bluegrass musicians. One wife is an actor and artistic director of a repertory theater and the other one is regional director of a national charity. Everyone is healthy.
I call myself a poet against the Bush-Enron Administration. The outlook is progressive. We have an Obama poster stapled to the back door of our house, where company can see it, but not strangers, from the road.
We had an Obama sign in the yard, during the election, and it kept being torn down. We are in a knot of holy-rollers here.
“He went to the library. On his bicycle.”
I call the book a memoir. It ran 49,000 words. With 40 pictures.
The two writers I’d compare my work to are Charles Bukowski and Charles Willeford. Both were prolific, they wrote in a variety of genres, and success came late to both of them. I suppose I was most influenced by Henry Miller, for whom recognition also came late.
These are not names a publisher is looking for a successor to, as you know. Plus, I’m 70 years old, and completely unknown. I don’t know how good I’d be on television. I might show my ass, or sull up and not say doodly-squat.
On the other hand, I am a fresh voice, I am funny and off-the-wall, and I am motivated to succeed. Whether I have what it takes is an open question.
Writers aren’t always good public speakers.
Worse, I don’t like to leave my writing room. I am busy at my desk, writing. I am where I should be.
Whatever happens to me I write about. It’s grist for the mill. Compare grits.
A Florida cracker lives on grits and grunts. The grunt is a saltwater panfish the conchs in the keys lived on during the Great Depression.
Stetson Kennedy wrote a book called Grits and Grunts. He was the head of the WPA Writer’s Project in Florida. He collected folk songs with Zora Neale Hurston.
One reason I have written so many books and not been published by New York is I finish a book and storm on in to the next one, without seeing the job through to publication. Also, I publish them on the worldwide web, at The Daily Bulletin (www.thedailybulletin.com), and my coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult, can read them there.
May I show you WAKE UP: CHRISTMAS IN PARKER?
I enclose a copy of my cv and a pamphlet from the book, It All Counts Towards 40 (Sample).
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books