BEAT BOOMERS HIS WAY THROUGH CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Just completed rewrite of Chapter Fourteen. Eight chapters of rewrite to go on Angie's Choice. If I set a pace of one chapter minimum per week, I'll be done in two months.

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!

CHRIS LUNA, COVER TO COVER BOOKS & RUSSELL MICKLER

Have been hard at work rewriting the novel which was my thesis for the Masters Degree in English with an emphasis on Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University. I have a goal of publishing it as an ebook with Amazon. I've got so much to learn about that process, but I was much helped by that inexpensive and informative 9 hour course with Russel Mickler called Blogging and Self-publishing. Rewriting is stimulating and fills in when original creative inspiration is flagging so it's good to have lots of old work lying around. 

MY HERMITAGE

I'm looking forward to the next Ghost Town Poetry reading on the second Thursday in April, organized by Chris Luna at Cover To Cover books. He's a local powerhouse when it comes to generating and publicizing things of value to local poets. My interest in that next opportunity to read generated two new poems. Then I dug up some poetry that I wrote in the late 1980s while I was living like a hermit in a farmhouse outside of Cheney. I think I published one or two poems from that series, but I lost interest in them as being too narrative and not as metaphorical as I had come to think was the best kind of poetry I could produce. In looking them over again, my interest in them was rekindled and I spent all day today, working away at them and dusting them off. I can see a chapbook length production in them. I was genuinely happy working away at them. They inspirited me, and I believe it is one or two of them that I'll read next at Ghost Town Poetry.