BEATNIKING OUT THE LÜSHIS

Thank you to the 81 people who checked in yesterday to see what I'm about. I have written 89 new lüshis by now, my goal to be 100 of them, for the manuscript I now call Wrestling Hanshan, and I have submitted my prostate cancer manuscript You Wake One Morning, Remembering to the Pittsburg University Press and The Iowa University Press contests. Last year, I submitted the ms to the Walt Whitman Prize of the Academy of American Poets. It was recently returned. The form letter was very encouraging, and I had to ask myself hopefully if they send back rejections in more than one form. Of course, the rejection is just being professional, so why does my mind want to make something special about it? The Pittsburg submission process asked for my curriculum vitae. Ha! What curriculum vitae? I sent in my list of publications (several pages) and honors (few as they are). 

Recently, after watching yet another coming of age film through sturm und drang of a young female protagonist, my brain—of its own volition of course—began working on a stormy film of my own, beginning with the scene after my first divorce when at age 36 I awoke from a dream of my infant self trapped in a VW with a snow monster in the passenger seat staring down at me who lay in the driver's seat from which I awoke, crying out in a pitiful child voice, "Mamma, Mamma," while tears streamed down my cheeks... I kid you not.