Dear _____:
I am writing a series of three books called Hick Lit: The Hidden, or Unknown Masterpiece.
By analogy with Chick Lit. I call Chick Lit Chick Lite.
I wouldn’t compare it to Bridget Jones’s Diary so much as to Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Cherry, and Lit: A Memoir.
It’s not a memoir it’s a fiction novel.
An immobilized
hero novel. My hero, Old Hick, is
immobilized in Point and Shoot,
He can’t see very well, he can’t hardly hear, his sense of smell is going.
His memory comes and goes. It depends on whether it’s recent or in the distant past, the ethnographic present.
The Melanesian Gambit. Making cat’s cradles out of cobwebs.
I was trained as an anthropologist.
I studied revitalization movements in college.
The trumpet shall sound! The trumpet creeper shall sound. It shall creep. It shall inch forward dialectically. Except when it fulgurates.
Is that a fulgurite or a coprolite, a vitrified lightning bolt or a fossilized turd?
It rips the head off American letters, shits down its neck, and calls it Old Turdhead.
This is not for everyone.
It’s not for people in university English departments or Creative Writing programs.
It’s not for arts commissars in arts agencies and cultural foundations.
It may not be for publishers or book reviewers in the media of mass communication.
We’ll find out—eh, what?
That’s the drama of it.