Lorin Stein
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
19
Union Square West
New York, NY 10003
Dear Lorin Stein:
I'm old and fired, but I had an endless career writing books that did not get
published when I was young, and writing them. 263 at this count, 264 in progress.
I wonder if you'd like to see 264 when I finish writing it.
OLD FOLKS AT
HOME, it's called: A FLORIDA CRACKER'S SUNSET CRUISE.
The book is in three
parts.
In "Florida's Forgotten Coast," 34,000 words, I write about
the mullet culture, of seine fishermen and shrimpers, relatives, the seine fishermen
put out of business by the net ban, the shrimpers next, to make way for land development,
along the coast. Brenda and I moved to Panama City, from South Florida, so Owen and
Balder could grow up with their aunt and uncles and friends who played bluegrass
music, hunted and fished, cooked, drank, and told stories around the old campfire.
I revisit places I dug, as an archeologist, before I became a writer. Owen now plays
fiddle with David Davis and the Warrior River Boys, out of Cullman, Alabama.
In "Florida's Emerald Coast," 10,000 words, I write about the changes I
have seen in South Walton County, since moving back to Florida after a stay in Atlanta,
where I worked as a technical writer for a fiber-optic cable manufacturer, until
they laid the whole writing group off. Balder lives in Grayton Beach, where he formed
the reggae-bluegrass fusion band Dread Clampitt. I call the people I worked with
in Atlanta, and the people moving into Walton County, the corporate cubicle dot-com
culture.
I like the mullet culture better, but that's like liking cowboys,
instead of bankers and accountants. Not very adaptive, in today's modern world.
"Elmo's World," as Ella Blue, the first grandchild, calls it.
In
"Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park," in progress, I visit Live Oak, where
both boys have played, and remember or imagine them growing up. I discuss race, from
the standpoint of a straight white male, from the south, of a certain age. A multiculturalism
that excludes the Florida cracker isn't pan-cultural, it is selectively biased against
an ethnic group nobody cares to defend. You come across as, if not a bigot, at least
a hick.
To me diversity means diversity. Nor reverse discrimination.
A working stiff never owned a plantation.
That's Nixon's Southern Strategy.
And it still works.
I write about trying to make it as a writer in a culture
that thinks a cracker is a racist. What publisher wants to associate himself with
racism?
I call myself a cracker, like a hippie calling himself a freak.
Call myself a Professor of Cracker Studies, without portfolio.
The three
parts of the book are illustrated with digital pictures I took with my point-and-shoot
camera. The book is being serialized at The Daily Bulletin, as I write it.
You can see a sample there. Soon, the whole bolus will be there.
And I'll
start writing another book, as I do.
I have, not just produced a body of
work I am proud of, my stack, but invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting.
New media spawn new opportunities. New opportunity spawns new literary forms.
What effect has the Internet had on the writing and publishing of literature? Look
on the Internet to find out.
There you will find writers excluded from a
conventional career, or writers who seized the new medium and used it for their own
artistic purposes.
But if their intention was to write and publish literature,
get it out to readers, hear back from readers, and respond to their comments in
real time, you're going to find something that doesn't look anything like the
novels, narrative nonfiction, or memoirs we are used to. You'll find a hodge-podge
of all three, switching back and forth, like the entries of a web log, or blog: a
poem, a prose vignette, an interview, a treatise on literary genres...a query letter,
a reply to a rejection slip, a proposal for a 12-book series.
Publishers
don't lead the way. Writers lead. Other writers follow. Then come the book reviewers,
literary critics, and "10,000 sneering college writing instructors," classifying
and imitating some outmoded way, at the behest of computers at the chain bookstores
in the mall.
The whole time Owen and Balder were growing up I was a failure.
An underground writer who didn't make any money writing. Who published his own books
and pamphlets.
But they weren't ashamed of me, they were proud of me. And
their friends read my books. Their friends considered me an outlaw rock star.
Romer's Rule is conservative, in that it suggests a form was just trying to maintain
its old adaptation in the face of new circumstances when the changed conditions caused
it to radiate, and fill new niches.
I just wanted to be an old Grove Press/Evergreen
Review writer.
That outlet disappeared out from under me, before I was
ready.
I kept writing.
A new outlet will appear.
And when
it does, someone will say, "You're just what we've been looking for."
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404