Q: What are you working on?
A: I'm writing my memoirs.
Q: What's it called?
A: Notes From Underground.
Q: Good title. Dostoevsky called a book Notes From Underground.
His was fiction.
A: Mine's fiction.
Q: Does Notes From Underground have a subtitle?
A: No.
Q: Have you thought of giving it a subtitle?
A: No.
Q: It will help people know what it is. Why they want to read it.
A: It's about retirement.
Q: After Bush.
A: After Nixon, actually.
My life took a wrong turn when Nixon
got in and shut down Lyndon Johnson's Great Society support to higher education.
Q: When the realists took over academic departments and threw out the idealists.
A: They took over book publishing about the same time. Writing became professionalized. There was a career path for a writer.
Q: You didn't take that path. You went underground instead.
A: Yes.
Q: The path not taken.
A: The path I took.
Q: The beet poet way.
A: Living well is the best revenge. Writing well.
Q: Notes From Underground: Writing Well is the Best Revenge.
A: Living Poor.
To write well you must live poor.
Q: Notes From Underground is a memoir in two parts. ON ASSIGNMENT and AT THE HOUSE.
A: Yes.
Q: And it's fiction.
A: Yes. A correspondence novel. And parts of it--large parts of it--is poems.
Q: That's a hard sell, brother.
A: Yes. Not just every writer is up to it.
Q: No.
A: So you see I can't just ignore ON ASSIGNMENT and write AT THE HOUSE. They are flip sides of the same coin.
Q: I see that.
They are Six Months of Daily Typewriting.
A: Yes. But I had to do a lot of writing to get to that point.
Q: And it's not school, the military, work, retirement. There is no retirement. You work until you die.
A: Or sell a book. And you probably won't sell a book.
You work
to support the writing.
Will write for food, will write for free, will pay
to write.
You pay to write and then you die.
Q: Unpublished, or underpublished.
A: Published in self-published pamphlets and on the worldwide web.