Q: If you want to hide a book from
A: Or publish it yourself and ask them to reprint it.
Q: Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family, you posted it at The Daily Bulletin, and LitVision Press published it, as an ink and paper book.
A: Yes. What’s ironic about that was I expected to be fired for blogging, as I was writing it.
Q: Sacked and blacklisted.
A: Yes.
Q: And were you?
A: No, I quit. One step ahead of a shoeshine.
Two steps ahead of the county line.
I said I was an
adventure travel correspondent, the ecotourism czar for
I applied for a
job as sex tourism czar of
Q: Didn’t you take a year to barnstorm for poetry when Bukowski Never Did This came out?
A: Yes. I cashed in an annuity I had rolled my retirement over into when my last good corporate job laid me off and lived on that money for a year, doing book-signings and poetry readings, staying in campgrounds and motels, driving, flying to zine conferences and such.
Q: What’s a zine?
A: From fanzine. A self-published chapbook. Anything from a pamphlet to a flier, or a four-page sheet.
Q: Bukowski crossed over from the underground to the mainstream.
His first 20 years were hard, but the last 20 were relatively easy.
A: I was finding out you couldn’t do that anymore. I couldn’t do what he did. The newspapers he published in, Open City and the L. A. Free Press, were gone now. Indeed, the small press movement that sustained him was gone. The little magazines and independent bookstores that sold small press publications were gone. The audience was gone, for all I knew.
How long had I been writing? 35 years? And I was still working full-time. With no end in sight.
Bukowski never did that.
My job was eating me alive.
The year I wrote about, I got fired for blogging from two six-months jobs.
Fired for being a writer.
Fired for writing at work, or thinking about the writing at work.
A writer can’t shut it off. When it wants to come it comes, unbidden and unstanchable.
Q: Would you recommend Bukowski Never Did This?
A: It’s classified 818.5203, American literature in English, 1900-1945, diaries, journals, notebooks, reminiscences.
I go back and forth between sections called Diary and sections called Novel, showing how the two influence, and cross-fertilize each other.
Q: Did you give it that classification?
A: No, the library did. I called it a novel.
A Moveable Feast is classified 818.5203.
Hemingway insisted A Moveable Feast was fiction.
“This book is fiction,” he wrote.
Q: If any part of it is fiction, it’s all fiction.
A: I don’t mind Bukowski Never Did This being next to A Moveable Feast on the bookshelves.
Hemingway never did this either.
Q: Did what?
A: Wrote 415 books without selling one to
Q: Don’t jinx yourself.
You haven’t done it yet.
A: I’m close. I’m at 402.
If I seize up and keel over just write The End at the end and call it unfinished.
Q: Norman Mailer ended Harlot’s Ghost “To be continued.”
A: And then he didn’t continue it.