Q: When did you start writing short pieces like "Easy to Find" and embedding them in books like INSIDE UNDERGROUND WRITING?
A: That started with my chronicle, when I was able to write at work, but
I wrote shorter pieces. I saw that they were related thematically and concatenated
them in order of composition, moving from genre to genre, in the book.
A
book is to my stack as a feuilleton is to a roman-feuilleton.
I began writing a roman-feuilleton when I got a job with a desk and a typewriter.
I thought I would be able to sell a roman-feuilleton.
I might not
be able to live in the French Quarter and write vignettes and feuilletons,
but if I worked at a desk job and wrote one roman-feuilleton after another
I could sell them.
I thought a roman-feuilleton would be commercial.
Q: And has it been?
A: Not yet.
I once had a web site called roman-feuilleton.com.
Several of the novels I wrote there I printed in pamphlet form, in editions of 25
copies.
Order Form
| Description | Price | Qty |
| A Lot of Hash Marks for Very Few Stripes (novel, in four pamphlets) | $20 | |
| Out of the South Comes the Whirlwind (novel, in four pamphlets) | $20 | |
| Red Tape, Whited Sepulchers, and Blue-Nosed Chauvinism (novel, in four pamphlets) | $20 | |
| The Golden Years (novel, in four pamphlets) | $20 |
Q: Why only 25 copies?
A: It was all I could afford.
It was all I needed.
Q: Do you ever get orders for pamphlets?
A: Yes.
Plus, I sell them at street fairs and crafts shows.
Out of my musette bag, on the street.
Q: The Redneck Street. Like the Arab Street.
A: What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
My hero is an antihero, a hero with scant resources, and my novel is an antinovel-a
novel about an antihero.
Q: A novel composed of feuilletons--a poem, a letter, an essay, an interview. A prose vignette. Stories.
A: Yes. It's all true stories, as Kerouac said.
Here's what Bob
Grumman said about my method.
Jack Saunders, who will soon have written "100 books without selling a word to New York or Hollywood," has a simple mode of operation: every day he sits at his computer for 37 hours or more and, like his hero Jack Kerouac, writes whatever comes into his head--which is mostly a defense of writing whatever comes into his head. Much of this is repetitious, but mythically so, and vastly reassuring to his fans (I'm proud to be one) who, my guess is, are similarly "marginal" writers who won't give up in spite of NY and Hollywood, and are grateful to find Jack's leaky but still somehow seaworthy dingy bobbing along with them no matter how many time zones left of the closest shipping lane they find themselves in.
Q: So your fans are other marginal writers?
A: Some of them are.
I'd say marginal people in general. The outsourced,
the downsized.
People who did everything right, and were cast out of the
middle-class anyway, as excess baggage.
Anyone who doesn't sing the company
fight song with enthusiasm and sincerity. Because of the way the company treats people.
A writer is to the War Heads in publishing, book-reviewing, grant-giving, and teaching
as an employee is to the company.
A vernacular writer is an ambassador in
bonds, who speaks boldly, as one ought to speak.
To his master.
I
could have called this book INSIDE VERNACULAR WRITING, but I already called a series
of books that.
Inside Vernacular Writing: The Mechanics of the Craft.
Q: What are the mechanics of the craft?
A: You write, you send it out, you write about what happens to it, and how what happens makes you feel.
Q: And one of the lessons you learned is don't print up more copies than you can afford to give away?
A: Yes.
Q: Anybody will take something that's free. Won't they?
A: Not if it's supposed to make you think.
You can't give that
away.
It's like trying to give away religious tracts.
People don't
want any part of them.
Q: Is that why blogs are stigmatized? They're free?
A: Blogs are stigmatized because it's too easy, and most of it is crap.