Saturday, July 31 (cont'd)

An online literary magazine invited Brew to submit something to them, so he sent "Brew and His Boys: The Liner Notes."

The editor wrote back, accepting it, and asked Brew if he'd write an introduction, so the reader would not be confused.

Brew sent "What Has Gone Before."

When I lived in Atlanta I rode a bike to work.

I used to watch the local news to see what the weather was going to be like in the morning.

I would leave early and get home early. On the way home, I would go by the post office, the public library, and the supermarket, to buy what I was going to cook that night for supper.

I ate early.

I would cook my supper and eat, sitting in front of the television.

Before the news came on, I watched Days of Our Lives.

At first, I didn't know what was happening, but I soon caught on.

If I watched the program today I would take it up right where I left it.

Some actors would have been written out of the show, but the story lines of the various subplots would be continuing, as before.

A writer of a serial has the technical problem to face of how much explanation to do. You want to make the book stand alone, but the characters are part of a repertory cast, familiar to reader of previous books. Too much description is unnecessary, to them.

A prolific author has an additional problem. James Jones said he got to where he could no longer remember if something happened to him, something happened to his hero, or he imagined it, and it didn't really happen.

I know I covered it but I can't remember in which book.

David Grisman said Stephane Grapelli would begin playing one song and segue into another song entirely. Without telling the other members of the band, who had to guess.

I wrote a book once called GUY LIT: A NOVEL. It was followed by GUY LIT: A MEMOIR.

The first one was about my doppelgänger, Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut. It was written in the third person and past tense. The second one was autobiography. In it, I used the first person, and some of the time the present tense.

The trouble is, sometimes, now, I move between autobiography and fiction, Jack Saunders and Art Brew, in the same book, and it's complicated by the fact that Brew's wife and kids are named Brenda, Owen, and Balder, as mine are.

Sometimes he has the same occupation.

But sometimes it's made up. I never was an ecotourism specialist, and I never was fired for blogging, although I did get laid off for lack of work, and the unspoken subtext was if I had been a sharper tool for the company, a 100%er, work for me to do would have been found, and I'd have been retained. Brew had burned his bridges with his arrogant attitude.

I thought I'd write a short piece about me and the boys, and send it to Bluegrass Unlimited, or Bluegrass Now, but when I read what I had written I knew an editor would ask me to clarify this, or take out that, and it wasn't worth the bother, for $3.33, so I sent it to LitVision, as-is.

As Louis Armstrong said about jazz: If I have to explain it to you, you won't get it.

Q: That's some hard life you have, going around to wine tastings and art exhibits, buying a video and screening it at home.

A: Ernie Pyle once rode around the Southwest visiting sites and talking to people.

He wrote six 1,000-word pieces a week for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain.

Maybe he could have done that sitting at home alone in his writing studio, maybe he needed to go out and see things, talk to people.

Maybe he was just naturally prolific.

If you are, your circumstances don't matter
.
Just as where you live doesn't matter.

But I found that, being able to "drive to Panacea," to things like Creaturefest 2003, made me feel like a writer, and inspired me.

Being on sabbatical was good for me.

Lord knows what it would be like to earn a living writing, or win a grant.

But I think it would unleash enormous energies.

Q: Well, having to go off sabbatical, and take a job, didn't slow you down very much.

A: No. I'm lucky that way.

Q: You wrote "Brew and His Boys: The Liner Notes" the night he asked you for it, didn't you?

A: Yes. "What Has Gone Before," too.

If they don't like them, I'll write them another one. But I don't change them.

Q: Why not?

A: It's a seamless fabric.

If I remember writing something, and take it out, and allude to it, and it's not there, there is a rent in the fabric.

I can remember everything I've written, but I can't remember everything I take out. I'll think I wrote it, so it must be there. It's easier to kill the whole piece than to revise things.

Plus, who do you revise them for? The only person a writer must please is himself. Nobody else.

Brew had a post card on his wall he sent himself from Red Hook Brewery, in Redmond, Washington. It showed a man in a balloon pouring his date a glass of beer, and was called "A Lofty Experience." On the back, it said, "Please write A WINE TOUR OF PARKER, FLORIDA."

Fuller Warren considered two postcards from Blountstown a draft.

Brew was not a balloonist, he was a feuilletonist. He once called a book BAY LEAVES, but the Bay County Junior League had named a cookbook Bay Leaves.

Olympic athletes are sometimes shown wearing a laurel (bay) leaf wreath.

The laurel (bay) leaf was considered a hangover remedy.

Brew also had a Red Hook bumper sticker on his car. It said, I BRAKE FOR CRAFTSMANSHIP.

Another bumper sticker said, BEEN TO SOPCHOPPY, MET THE POTTER.

Brew never passed a brewery--he was named after one--or a potter, a glass blower or a weaver, a man who made hand-crafted books, who wrote them, edited, them, published them, sold them out of a musette bag, reviewed them, like Whitman reviewing Leaves of Grass.

Apropos of leaves.

People never passed Brew.

Big Chief sent Brew a Care package with a sheaf of bay leaves in it. Big medicine.

The package also contained an In-basket with Brew's portrait in the bottom and, "I ain't never finished" written on the side.