Folk Fest

 

I went to Folk Fest at the North Atlanta Trade Center.

A big trade show for outsider art.  Woodie Long was there.

Several galleries sold his work.  Owen used to stay with Woodie

and Dot in Andalusia, Alabama, and they had a gallery in Santa Rosa Beach.

Also, later, one in Florala, Alabama.  A mule and kites.

 

 

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I talked to Dot.  She said Woodie painted 1,000 paintings

a year.  That’s three a day.  By now I was writing a book a month.

A folk artist is prolific.  I considered myself a folk artist.  I called a character

Art “Home” Brew, compare art brut.  Art brut is outsider art.  Naïve art.  Visionary art.

I called a book VISIONS OF FLORIDA.  A folk artist is regional.  Souls Grown Deep:

 African-American Vernacular Art of the South.  I was the Two Egg, Sopchoppy,

Money Bayou, Hogtown Bayou quadrangle, with Wewahitchka in the center.

I had Vernacular Writer business cards made up.

 

 

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The card followed me from Lilburn, to Tucker, to Norcross, Georgia.

 

 

VISIONS OF FLORIDA.  Scott Meredith calls SOUTHERN GOTHIC "unpublishable."  Hear back on grants.  Answer:  no.  Give reading in Winter Park.  Rent car, drive around state, write about it.  John Bennett flies me to Seattle for publication party of Black Messiah.  Read out there, go on trip selling Screed, Black Messiah, and the Vagabond Anthology out of back of John's van.  You ought to try to sell a Henry Miller Festschrift to a militant lesbian feminist Third World socialist bookstore.  Begin to hear from readers about Screed.  Begin to appear more frequently in little magazines.  This book could have been a turning point, but wasn't.  I took the path not taken, and write about what it's like to do that.

 

 

VISIONS OF FLORIDA was about being excluded.

Or taking the path not taken.  Exploring.  Who wants to follow the pack?

Better to light out for the territory.

 

 

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