Seattle (cont'd)

I'm flying home tomorrow morning.
Then a trip to Atlanta. Then Paradise Garden.
Then complete my book. Then start another book
the next day, or the same day. Or start two books.
What would Trollope have done with a small, desktop
computer? Balzac and Dickens? In Love and Fame
in New York, Ed Sanders calls a character Genius Hick.
Making fun of Thomas Wolfe. Youngblood Hawke.
Will I find a literary agent like Suzanne Pleshette?
Will my Bukowski book rival Grace Metalious's Peyton Place?
Will I enter the American pantheon? Will my book enter the canon?
Stephen King, Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, John Grisham. Kilgore Trout.
Richard Brautigan. Sometimes the money comes at the start, then stops,
sometimes it comes continuously, and grows, sometimes it comes at the end,
as lagniappe. Sometimes it doesn't come at all. What's wrong with this picture?
A day late and a dollar short. No tits and no veteran's preference. Too late,
the phalarope. We just fit. Hugo is so big. Fred Ward does a double-take.
Don't worry about the harvest. Focus on the process.

Q: INSIDE UNDERGROUND WRITING: TWO ZINE FESTS, A HOOTENANNY, AND A SIDE-TRIP TO PARADISE GARDEN also contains a death in the family and Hurricane Dennis evacuation.

A: Yes.

It started out PHILLY ZINE FEST 2005.

Q: Basically, it's a month in the life of an underground writer.

A: Yes. An eventful month. But a month.

My months are full. Combining writing, work, and household chores.

Going to zine fests is work. Not play. Not a holiday.

Q: Do you think you'll ever earn a technical writer's wages writing enema vérité?

A: I haven't yet.

I thought I would, starting out.

I try not to think about it, now.

I just do what I have to do and hope for the best.

I just muddle along.

Q: You do think about it. You write about it. It's your subject. Your obsession. Your theme.

A: I meant I write about it more calmly, more objectively, with more detachment. Not as shrill. As desperate.

Q: You could call Underground Underground: Two Months in the Life of America's Greatest Writer.

A: Short for "America's greatest living unpublished, or underpublished writer, perhaps the greatest unpublished, or underpublished American writer ever."

But that would sound like I am imitating Dave Eggers and his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Q: You called a series of books Potsherd-Tower once. Featuring Johnny Potsherd, who went around sowing self-published pamphlets and vernacular writer business cards in state park laundromats and Forest Service latrines.

Inspired by the remark that Eugene O'Neill's works stood in towering rebuke to that of his contemporaries.

A: Yes, and by analogy with Kurt Schwitters' Schwitters-Column, the statue he built in his apartment in Hanover.

Every day he added to it, and everything he added changed the relation of existing elements to each other, and the whole.

Q: You aren't imitating Eggers so much as asking for a title fight.

They won't give you a shot at the title.

They're ducking you.

A: I am unqualified.

Q: You could make Underground: Two Months in the Life of America's Greatest Writer a book in three parts, rather than a series of three books.

And give yourself an extra month, for slack. For wiggle room.

Call it UNDERGROUND: THREE MONTHS IN THE LIFE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST WRITER

A: I like it. The three months follow the publication of Bukowski Never Did This.

I go around barnstorming for it.

Trying to sell it.

Doing my dance of desperation. As Desi Arnaz says. America's favorite Cuban bandleader.

INSIDE UNDERGROUND WRITING: TWO ZINE FESTS, A HOOTENANNY, AND A SIDE-TRIP TO PARADISE GARDEN. July 1 to August 1. ______ words. A diary of the month my first book in 17 years came out, my mother died, and we went hurricane evac to Tallahassee, with thoughts on the creative writing program industry. I see that "Inside Underground Writing" is the first part of a three-part book.

UNDERGROUND WRITER: A LIFE OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM. August 1 to September 30. ______ words. A memoir. Written concurrently with "Journal of a Memoir."

JOURNAL OF A MEMOIR. August 1 to September 30. ______ words. Written concurrently with "Underground Writer: A Life Outside the Mainstream."

Q: Whew-White Folks!

A: Yes.

Q: You could call your hero White Folks instead of Old Folks.

A: Yes.

_________________________
(1) Short for "America's greatest living unpublished, or underpublished writer, perhaps the greatest unpublished, or underpublished American writer ever."