From: Jack Saunders
To: ///////////// [redacted]
Subj: Query

Next year is the 50th anniversary of my high school class, the Class of '57.

The Class of '57 Had Its Dreams.

That's the name of a Statler Brothers song.

I decided to write a book for my class reunion, telling what I had learned in 50 years, since dropping out of high school and enlisting in the Air Force.

I was a headliner at the Legends of the Underground readings the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA) held at the Amato Opera Theater, off-off-Broadway.

Underground legend is an oxymoron, like literary alliance. It's just me, writing chapbooks and posting series of related novels on the worldwide web, daily, as I write them. At The Daily Bulletin.

In that 50 years I went from loving bebop, and identifying with urban black jazz musicians, to loving bluegrass, and identifying with rural white bluegrass pickers.

I am going to attend the Everglades Bluegrass Festival in February and see bandmates my sons played with, growing up. They're both professional musicians now.

I'll stop by Delray Beach on the way down, or back, and see my old hometown, of which my father was the first elected mayor, and Grand Marshal of the Gladiola Parade, in 1949. Delray Beach was segregated, then.

When Frank McCourt published Angela's Ashes it struck a chord with readers and he became the "mick of the moment," he says. People responded to his voice.

The same thing could happen to me. I could become the Florida cracker of the moment, when READFEST 2006, BY JACK SAUNDERS, VERNACULAR WRITER, is published.

The swinette-picker of American letters.

Swinette-picker, and vernacular writer, are defined in READFEST 2006 (www.thedailybulletin.com/readfest/readfest.html).

Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Panama City, Florida

Memoir. One-line pitch: You must go home again. And again. And again.

Trivia: One of my 273 unpublished, or underpublished books was called COOKING, and contained recipes, and stories about the dishes Owen, Balder, Brenda, or I cooked. The title is a play on words with the Miles Davis album, Cookin'.