From: Jack Saunders
To: Lisa Hagan
Subj: Query

Next year is the 50th anniversary of my high school class at Seacrest High School in Delray Beach, Florida. The Class of '57. I am writing a book to celebrate the event. READFEST 2006. In that 50 years I went from loving bebop, abstract expressionist painting, and beat writing to loving bluegrass music, folk art, and vernacular writing. I am going to a bluegrass festival in Ojus in February, and will visit Delray Beach as part of that trip. We used to live across the street from Old School Square, in my grandparents' house at 52 North Swinton Avenue. Once, when The Delray Affair denied me a booth I held a counterfair in my front yard and called it The Dreyfus Affair - Banned Books.

I had a book published last year called Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family. I commissioned a painting for the cover from a friend, showing me rescuing Miss Weekiwachee from the Creature from the Black Lagoon, filmed at nearby Wakulla Springs, but my publisher used another painting on the cover. So it's available. I have on my B & B Feed & Seed gimme cap with the anatomically correct boar hog on the front.

This is my 35th year as a writer. READFEST 2006 is my 274th book. I still haven't sold a book to New York, Hollywood, or a major regional or fine arts press. But Brenda and I are still together and the boys are doing well.

Owen plays fiddle with the Warrior River Boys. He's married, one daughter, another child on the way. Balder plays mandolin with the reggae-bluegrass fusion band Dread Clampitt. His wife is pregnant and she had a son from a previous liaison.

Brenda works at a mental health center in Panama City keeping track of children in state care. I worked as a technical writer for many years. I am on social security and I cashed in an annuity I rolled my retirement over into when I got laid off to give myself a year to promote Bukowski Never Did This and write books like READFEST 2006.

When that money runs out I'll look for work again.

It never gets easier. You just slow down and start forgetting. It takes longer for your joints to start working.

I post my books online, daily, as I write them. At The Daily Bulletin. My publisher, LitVision Press, sells Bukowski Never Did This online.

READFEST 2006 is a memoir about race, sex, and working for a living by a straight white male, of a certain age, from the south. The man who invented vernacular writing, in fact, and is its chief, if not sole, practitioner. I show how and why I did that.

Others will follow, as it's the only place for a serious writer in a gimcrack culture to go. Into the breech! The insterstices. The cracks. A Florida cracker cracks the cow whip of doom.

The tighter the crack the more leverage you have.