From: Jack Saunders
To: Sarah Davies, Greenhouse Literary
Subj: Query, WRITER
I saw your listing at Publishers Marketplace.
I have just finished writing a book called WRITER. It ran 82,000 words.
I posted the book online, daily, as I wrote it, at The Daily Bulletin (www.thedailybulletin.com), and responded to reader comment, in the book. That is, in real time.
One of my sons has an
Teacher, leave those kids alone. We don’t need no thought control.
Pink Floyd’s The Wall sold in this country with no publicity beforehand at all. That is, the market was international.
I am still scuffling after all these years.
WRITER celebrates my 39th anniversary as a writer. And 72nd birthday.
Here follow the first five pages of WRITER.
Jack Saunders.
Student
My name’s Jack and I’m a writer.
I write books.
Hardback books, paperback books, books you download, print out, and read as loose sheets, at work, at the public library, or at home, if you have a computer and a printer.
I thought, when I was starting out, that I would sell a book to a publisher, for money, and live off the proceeds while I wrote the next book, but I didn’t sell a book, to a publisher.
Writing without publishing is like chewing without swallowing. I did the job myself. With the help of friends.
Since I didn’t sell any books, through a publisher, I had to work, to support myself, and to pay to print up and mail out books, or post them on the worldwide web, and write before and after work, and during work. I taught myself to do this.
My wife works. She believes in me.
If I have unemployment coming in, I stay at the house, and write.
I inherited some money, and spent it on writing.
I had a retirement plan at work. I cashed it in when the company laid me off and lived on it while I promoted a book a small press had published.
The year I became a writer, I stole the last year of my NDEA fellowship in Anthropology at Tulane, stayed at the house, and taught myself to write.
It was time.
I worked as a consultant writing an application for a grant for a mental health center, and they had a sign in the coffee mess that said, Carpe Donut.
Seize the Donut.
If you weren’t fast enough you would draw back a stump. Those people all had a big sugar jones.
Sugar is wholesome, natural, organic. Always fresh because it’s frozen.
Sugar is poison. If you haven’t read Sugar Blues you don’t know where I’m coming from. Adelle Davis. Let’s have healthy bowel movements.
Support local culture. Make your own yogurt.
Sprout your own alfalfa sprouts.
Bake your own hoecake.
Hoecake and tomato gravy. A trash fish étouffée. Black beans and brown rice.
With a mojo de ajo, calamondin off our own bush. Eat seeds, pulp, and skin. The seeds are roughage. Grow your own garlic.
Blues and roots. Rues and bluets. Roots music, independent film, vernacular writing.
When an opportunity comes, grab it. It might not come again.
Wrestle it to the ground and put a dog nelson on it.
That’s a full nelson with pelvic thrusting.
Vice President Cheney says conservation is a personal virtue.
He fabricated our energy policy, in secret.
How do you like it now, gentlemen?
It’s me and Cheney locked in carnal embrace, fighting it out for the earthly vehicle of the Mall Builder culture.
He has a podium and I don’t.
But daily typewriting is a bully pulpit.
What do I need a platform for if my platform is built on sand, or among thorns, or on barren ground?
Look what happened to Cheney’s oil platform.
It went down in flames, killing everyone who couldn’t get to a lifeboat.
It’s gushing out pollution even as we speak.
Who knew? Who would have predicted?
I knew. I said so.
That’s why I haven’t found a publisher yet.
I think.
It could be I’m not good enough, or I’m too negative.
Too serious.
It could be I take myself too serious.
Q: Melville said a whaling ship was his Harvard and his Yale.
A: I used to say two hitches in the Air Force were my Harvard and my Yale.
Q: Why two hitches?
A: The first one, it was between
There was a draft.
You were expected to serve.
If you didn’t enlist, you’d be drafted.
I enlisted, to get it out of the way.
I wasn’t doing well in high school and I couldn’t go to college without graduating from high school. So I went in the Air Force and took the high school GED test.
Then, when I got
out, I lived at home and went to
I made straight A’s and took a maximum load.
Q: Did they have the GI Bill when you got out the first time?
A: No. But
I did get overseas. I spent 18 months on
I liked it overseas.
Q: Why didn’t you stay the second year and finish junior college?
A: I couldn’t take living at home. My father’s glares at the supper table.
I thought, if I reenlisted, I could get back overseas again, I would learn a trade I could support myself at, in civilian life, and they would have the GI Bill when I got out the second time.
I did get back
overseas, to
I went to
Q: Did you go to
A: No, I worked as a computer tester and lived in
an efficiency apartment on
And drinking. Bill was a drinker.
I was a drinker. The Saunders Brothers drank.
Q: So you were ready to become a writer?
A: No. Not yet.
I wanted to finish college, find a soul-mate, and get married. Then I would start writing.
Q: So
A: Yes. A state school. By the time I went there the Vietnam War was going, and there was an antiwar movement. Some of the students protested the war.
Some of the students were veterans, like me.
I graduated in 1968. That was a tumultuous year. LBJ didn’t run for reelection.
You couldn’t have
a Great Society and
Q: Guns or butter.
A: Yes. But academia was a cocoon. I graduated from college and went to graduate school. I got paid to go to school. Why not? I could get a PhD and teach college for my day job. I could teach myself to write working as an anthropology teacher. A college professor.
Q: You did well at FSU.
A: I was a good student.
I graduated magna cum laude. I made Phi Beta Kappa. I was an Outstanding Senior.
I won a University Fellowship to FSU for a year. I could draw it and the last year of my GI Bill. So I stayed at FSU an extra year.
My work habits, as a writer, were an extension of my study habits, in college.
I was a serious student.
I listened, in class. I read all the assignments, and then some.
I wrote term papers.
I learned to write researching and writing term papers in anthropology in college.
It was good practice.
I learned self-discipline. I was self-motivated. I had a call.
I was just working out the mechanics of it.
It was a place to learn.
College is a good place to learn. To explore your boundaries. To learn your limits. What you’re capable of. If you’re mature enough to benefit from it.
I was mature.
Q: You did well in graduate school at
A: Straight A’s. Me and Brenda both.
I had met Brenda and we had gotten married.
Q: Then what happened?
A: Tulane.
Minor chord.
Fate motive in Faust.
We went to Tulane.