Q: Philadelphia Weekly has a notice on the upcoming ULA reading that's very respectful.
Since its inception as a handful of zine publishers converging in Hoboken, N. J., the Underground Literary Alliance has acted as sort of a real-life Barton Fink--meaning the ULA has taken a rather adversarial stance against what they consider to be the elitist, inaccessible nature of the current literati. Instead they focus on literature produced and enjoyed by regular ol' working folks. (Writers who seem to receive the ULA's perpetual wrath include Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen and anyone involved with McSweeney's.) ULA Read-Off headliner Jack Saunders exhibits the fiercely independent spirit of the alliance, having written more than 260 novels despite being rejected by every major literary publishing house and agency. But now that the ULA's indie label LitVision Press is putting out his latest work Bukowski Never Did This, Saunders has gained a new momentum (not that a writer who already churns out a book a month needs any more encouragement). Other readers include locals such as Ish Klein, Michael Grover and Frank Walsh. (Maggie Serota).
A: That's positive.
Q: How do you explain writing a book a month?
A: Practice.
If you sit down and write for several hours every
day, provided that you know how to write, you, too, will write a book a month.
They will be accessible to working people.
Mind, you, working people might
have trouble finding them. But if they find one, they will be able to relate to it.
Q: Have you always written a book a month?
A: Of course not.
My early pace was 2½ books a year.
Then
five books a year.
I've only been writing a book a month for the last five
years. Since I got on an Internet computer.
Q: What's your personal best.
A: I think I wrote 18 books in a year a couple of times. One year--2002--I
wrote 24 books.
That year I was on sabbatical.
I both (1) had a year
to write, and (2) was living by myself, for part of the time.
Q: What's your average overall?
A: 267 books divided by 34 years. On August 31. If I make it.
Q: 7.8 books a year.
A: Some of those years were busy, with me working full-time, or working and helping out at home, after Brenda went back to work.
Q: And yet, you kept writing.
A: I'm a writer. Writers write.
Q: I'd go out to see what a writer like you looks like.
Are you
a nut-case? A weirdo? A fanatic?
A: Writing that much without selling anything makes you "crabby and
hung-up" about rejection.
But maybe that is changing.
INSIDE
UNDERGROUND WRITING: TWO ZINE FESTS, A HOOTENANNY, AND A SIDE-TRIP TO PARADISE GARDEN
is a good book, and may be historic.
Plus, the next two, UNDERGROUND WRITER:
A LIFE OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM and JOURNAL OF A MEMOIR should be interesting.
In those, I affirm my loyalty to daily typewriting.