Having a job with a desk and a typewriter, access to a copying machine, money to buy small press books and subscribe to little magazines, money for postage to send poems and stories out, opened my writing up. Like Bird first playing what he'd been hearing in his head at Dan Wall's chili joint in 1939, I came alive.

Not only did my productivity go up, but the form of what I was writing opened up, too.

I bought everything Bukowski had written. I saw that he was writing poems, then short stories, then nonfiction pieces, and collecting them in books of similar pieces, collections of poems, collections of short stories, collections of nonfiction pieces, plus the novels, which covered the same small handful of events in his life as the poems, short stories, and so forth did.

I saw that I was doing the same thing.

I concatenated the pieces I was writing, in order of composition, and called book-length sections books. I gave the books titles. Beginnings, middles, and ends. The books formed series of related books They were related by subject matter, or theme, and they were related by the author's voice, my voice.

And, I left the letters in. Where I wrote them. Letters telling what I was hoping to accomplish and how I felt about what happened to the pieces as I sent them out.

I included query letters, I included letters to the editor, I included replies to rejection slips, or book reviews, and I included personal letters to friends, about family.

Hemingway once described his occupation as, "I write hardbound books for money."

That's what I thought I was doing. Perhaps trade paperback books.

Consider a series of books like Against the Grain, the three books FLUSH, BLAST, and STRETCH.

William Carlos Williams said that being against the grain was very much in the American grain, and that what was in the mainstream was dead, lifeless, a hollow shell, pumped up by hype, a bestseller graveyard, and what was at the margins, neglected, opposed by critical and popular opinion, turned out to have legs, to survive, to prevail.

I thought that if FLUSH, BLAST, and STRETCH were published, Against the Grain would become a classic, like Castle to Castle, Rigadoon, and North.

I called what I was doing My Chronicle, after Céline, who said he didn't have time to answer the gazettes, he had his chronicle to finish, his endless, or enormous debts to pay.

I answered the gazettes in my chronicle.

Also, now, I had Playing Hurt to send out, also another book Larry and Hazel published for me, Raw Energy: A Cookbook for Action Painters.

I heard back good things from readers on these, and that encouraged me.

What I am doing now is related to what I was doing then.

I call what I am doing daily typewriting.

That means (1) I do it daily, and (2) I don't polish it. Don't revise it. Except for correcting typos and infelicitous phrasings, what comes out live, spontaneous, not overly planned, stands. I follow the writing where it takes me, and a mistake can be as valuable as an outline. It can send me off on a tangent.

Sometimes I call what I am doing enema vérité. What you see on the end of the fork when you really look. Sometimes to see what's on the fork we have to eat with chopsticks.

And sometimes I call it the paranoia-critical method. I write, I send it out, I write about what happens to it, and how what happens makes me feel. What I do about how I feel. I write.

Q: You thought when you wrote FLUSH, BLAST, and STRETCH you were writing books for money?

A: Yes, I did. I think I'm writing READFEST 2006 for money.

I'm a writer. That's what writers do.

They sell books and live on the proceeds to write the next book.

They get where they can write full-time and get better at writing.

That's all they want to do, or all I want to do. Get better at writing. By doing it with more concentration, fewer distractions, less interruption, fewer missed opportunities.

Q: So you're against work because it interferes with writing.

A: Writing is work.

I have worked twice as hard, for twice as long, as anyone I ever heard of.