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| It's not all peaches and cream in Portland |
For no reason at all that I could at first discover, I included this photo from downtown Portland on Labor Day two years past. As I uploaded it, I thought it ought to be titled: IT'S NOT ALL PEACHES AND CREAM IN PORTLAND, then I realized this photo actually refers to the previous post in which I mention the unmentioned reasons for the time lapse between my first novel under the tutelage of Britain's Kenneth Hopkins in 1965 and my appearance in the writing program at Eastern Washington University ten years later in 1975.
In my drinking years and in my struggle to imagine myself as a writer, that image of people sleeping in a doorway, and others like it, have always burned in my imagination. I literally felt I was one misstep from sleeping in doorways myself. The photo on the right is a picture of me in a Cheney, Washington alley not too long after my arrival in Washington to attend Eastern Washington University. I'm in full blue collar, drifter regalia except for the book bag slung over my shoulder—denim jacket, denim shirt, Levis and steel toed boots. I took several pictures of alleys that first summer and fall in Cheney.
This alley photo is aptly dark and mysterious, I thought at the time. You can see the snow on the ground and the winter light explains the murky quality of the photo...a technical detail I still don't know how to fix, but, hey, I was a murky sort of individual at the time, and I have managed to tone that up a bit. Everything an individual does always psychologically fits, if you think about it. I like to know the personal histories of the writers I enjoy. It makes sense that most of the writers I was drawn to were alcoholics, doesn't it? Oh yeah!
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