Rick Campbell
From: Jack Saunders, Garage Band Books
To: Rick Campbell, Anhinga
Press, Florida Literary Arts Coalition
Subj: Reckoning Kin
When two aborigines meet in the Australian desert they reckon kin until they
find a common ancestor, or they will have to kill each other.
I attended
Florida State University, majoring in anthropology, graduating magna cum laude in
1968. I made Phi Beta Kappa and was an Outstanding Senior--the only one not pictured
in the annual. I did a year's graduate work in anthropology at FSU, specializing
in southeastern archeology, then my wife Brenda and I transferred to Tulane, where
they had an accelerated PhD program. We got married our last summer in the field,
living in Panacea, out on Alligator Point, and digging a Santa Rosa - Swift Creek
burial mound on Mashes Island.
Nixon got in and shut the Lyndon Johnson Great
Society money off and we were stranded in the pipeline. I didn't want to be an academic
anyway, that was just a day job--I was being paid to go to school, although some
of it was loans I'd have to pay back--so I stole the last year of my NDEA fellowship
to teach myself to write, signed up for Thesis, to draw my stipend, stayed at home,
and wrote 2½ unpublished books. I called it a DIY Fellowship.
We moved to
the mountains of North Carolina to live poor and write. We lived poor and I wrote.
Brenda got pregnant with Owen and I worked as a potter's helper at Penland School
of Handicrafts, later as laborer in a feldspar mine. We moved to Winston-Salem in
search of work. I worked as a clerk in a store (Homecrafts, owned by John Ehle and
managed by North Carolina poet Maria Ingram), electrician's helper, carpenter's helper,
press brake operator trainee, and janitor in a department store, with unemployment
between jobs. When I got fired for stealing six rolls of toilet paper we moved back
to Florida, where I got a job as a technical writer in Fort Walton Beach.
I sent poems and stories to the Apalachee Quarterly, where Pete LeForge said
he took great pleasure in rejecting them. He called a chapbook he reviewed, Raw
Energy, "anecdotes and ravings." (That's mild. Merritt Clifton lumped
a chapbook he reviewed, Trailer Park Tramp, with several others in a category
he called "Drivel Beyond Help.")
Apalachee Quarterly did
accept a poem in the Tallahassee Issue with the possum climbing up the New Capitol
like King Kong climbing the Empire State Building.
Potter tells about
walking out on deck
in his shorts. It is dawn.
He went to cut a fart
and shit a brown stream down his leg,
like a seagull. This is the life, he thought.
In Fort Walton Beach, Balder was born.
I got a state job as an information
specialist with the Department of Commerce and Brenda and I moved to Tallahassee,
where she put Owen and Balder in nursery school and went to work in the state preservation
lab, analyzing bones and maintaining the comparative anatomical collections. She
would deflesh road kills, macerating them in a 55 gal oil drum of water or covering
them with hard cloth to keep raptorial birds off and putting dermestid beetles on
them. Once I changed the water in her oil drum and got a snootful of foul water
siphoning through a garden hose.
I made overtures to the writers associated
with the writing program at FSU but was rebuffed, I felt. Van Brock asked me to
have a cup of coffee and a chat, but the younger writers shunned me, I felt. David
Morrill's father Tom liked me, I felt. I put our correspondence in my first published
book-length book, Screed, which was about him suing Ed Ball about the fence
across the Wakulla River, in part.
Jerry Stern used to leave me out of his
year-end round-ups of What is the Florida novel? Who is the Florida writer? As
students, we lived down the street from him, on McDaniel, but he and I never met.
I never met Janet Burroway. Although I did meet Gloria Jahoda. In AA.
She
asked her agent to read a manuscript of mine, about the Taylor County sinkhole murders,
at which Brenda was an expert witness as a forensic zooarcheologist at the trial,
but I didn't follow the agent's advice, and the agent didn't take me on as a client.
I got sacked at the Department of Commerce, filed a grievance, and blacklisted myself,
in a company town.
Worked at Andersonville, as an archeological field worker,
worked at the Old Capitol, when it was renovated, as a demolition laborer.
When Brenda went into the field, to survey Big Cypress Swamp, my mother offered to
help me watch the kids, so we went down there, I found a job in Delray Beach, and
we moved.
I published books and pamphlets. Worked as an information developer
for IBM. Wrote a newspaper column, making fun of the Division of Cultural Affairs,
in Tallahassee, which kept turning me down for a grant.
One year I won, in
fiction or poetry, I don't remember which, and they said they only had enough money
for one winner (in fiction and poetry) and I was runner-up. I got a certificate
thanking me for my contribution to the arts.
I quit my job at IBM to write
and publish Evil Genius and Open Book and write Forty.
Forty was published by Popular Reality. It was my 40th book.
We moved
to Panama City so Owen and Balder could hunt and fish and be near their aunt and
uncles, who played bluegrass music. Owen now plays fiddle with David Davis and the
Warrior River Boys, out of Cullman, Alabama, and Balder is co-founder and bandleader
of Dread Clampitt, out of Grayton Beach. They have played with the Tallahassee band
the Bottom Dollar Boys, Owen appeared at the Convention Center when he was with James
King, and Dread Clampitt play the Warehouse, now and then.
Barbara Hamby
was on a panel that rejected me for a grant one year, and she rejected a long poem
I turned into a screenplay at Apalachee Quarterly, "The Water Towers
of Malone, Florida 32445." About going to see Owen play at a church in Bainbridge,
Georgia, when he was with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, and Balder was just out of
boot camp, at Parris Island, en route to music school, to be a Marine bandsman.
We went tango-uniform during the transition to a post Cold War economy, which was
not a happy period for defense contractors. Tits-up. Lost our house on Martin
Lake and moved back into the trailer behind Uncle Wayne and Granny Brown in Parker.
Brenda got a job at the new prison in Wewahitchka installing the phone system and
maintaining the computers. Mike Lister was the chaplain, and hadn't published his
first book yet. I got a job with Lucent Technologies, in Atlanta, and we got back
on our feet, financially. During the dot-com boom.
When Lucent laid me off
I was 62. I went on early, reduced-benefit social security, drew unemployment, and
wrote, for a year. I moved back to Panama City and started fixing up Brenda's old
home place, which we would live in rent-free until Uncle Wayne's estate was settled,
then buy from Brenda's siblings.
I had started posting books on the worldwide
web, daily, as I wrote them, in Atlanta, and continued doing that, in Panama City.
When Robert Olen Butler was writing a short story online, at FSU, at Inside Creative
Writing, I wrote and told him I was writing at book a month online, at Inside
Vernacular Writing, at The Daily Bugle, but he did not reply.
I took a job as a tech writer, to pay for the house, and got fired for blogging,
after five months.
I got another job, as a grant writer, in DeFuniak Springs,
and commuted to it. I made it through my first (six month) performance appraisal.
LitVision Press is publishing my book about working at those two jobs. Bukowski
Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family.
It's the first book-length book I have published since Forty. And that was
17 years ago.
When Lucent laid me off, I rolled my retirement over into an
annuity.
I just quit my job, cashed my annuity in, and gave myself an LDA
grant.
I'm going to promote Bukowski Never Did This and write DRAGGING
UP: ART BREW GIVES HIMSELF AN LDA GRANT (LAST DITCH ATTEMPT) and POSTCARDS
FROM POINT AND SHOOT.
So I'm a full-time writer, until my money runs out,
when I'll take another job.
I'm 65, so I'm on Medicare.
Brenda's
working in a community mental health care center. With the Republicans in, business
is booming. A lot of domestic abuse, meth labs, depression, child abuse, substance
abuse, suicides.
Me, I'm as happy as a dead pig in the sunshine.
Oh, yea, in May 2000 I was a headliner at the Underground Literary Alliance's Legends
of the Underground reading, off-off-Broadway. LitVision Press is going to put a
ULA logo on the book. They're a member.
It's kind of like having an anti-Oprah
logo on your book.
Also, I read at Konglomerati Foundation, years ago, and
know Richard Mathews, from that.
I don't know whether the Florida Literary
Arts Coalition is interested in having a jakeleg press like Garage Band Books as
a member or not. I would like to get on a newsletter mailing list, so I'll know
about things like your book conference in time to propose a panel. I have written
over 250 books, published 8 book-length books, published scores of chapbooks and
pamphlets, and published over 60 books online.
A tech writer who made good.
Through shit, grit, and Mother Wit. From the mimeo revolution to the worldwide
web. Daily typewriting lives!