Pat King:  Okay, the question for this week is "Where are we going? Where have we been?" Yeah, from that short story. I'm clever ain't I? Anyway, hopefully this will be bit lighter than our last roundtable. I'd like to start out by hearing about the path you took to becoming a writer, when you thought your stuff was good enough to send out and what you'd like to accomplish as a writer......

I'll be moderating this one again, asking questions and trying to keep things "on topic." That kind of thing. Have fun!

I wrote for myself mostly for the next 9 years. I had some poems published in my college literary magazine, but still mostly wrote for release and did not have any desire to publish outside of that small group. Truth be told most of what I was writing then was not very good, it told the story of my life in only a way that I could understand it. In 2003-2004, after returning to the same college to get a degree in a new major, I won First Prize for Poetry both years and Third Prize for Short Fiction. This got me thinking about publishing, but it did not push me into it.

Last summer, I started attempting to get published and spent a good while getting rejected, and I was feeling like it wasn't worth it. Then I met my good friend Karl Koweski who gave me ideas as to where my work might fit in, gave me encouragement to submit, and was man enough to let me know when my work was not up to par. From that point on, I have been getting picked up to the tune of about 50 poems in about 15 different magazines.

I would like to see myself growing and learning as a writer everyday, and making personal connections with other writers. I think that is where I learn the most, having honest conversation and reading what spills from their minds. I would like to publish chaps of both poetry and short stories, and maybe someday attempt the novel. I don't think I am there yet, but I would like to be someday. I have a lot of learning to do about the finesse of dialogue and character building, and that takes time.

Weatherman:  i started writing...i am not sure if i can pin point a specific time. i have all ways liked to read, and i would write little short stories when i was a kid, but i think i thought everyone did that. my brother would draw, and i would write.

when i was 13, i got caught up in the juvenile system, and that is when my writing became something more than a hobby. i had to be covert about my writing, because the counselors and staff at these juvenile facilities did not believe my writing was theraputic. they thought it was reverse that.

until recently, i had not been aware that my writing was worth publishing. i wrote for me, and i rarely showed it to anyone. not just because i didn't think it was any good, but because i didn't want people to get the wrong impression. my writing is not light and fluffy. it is often dark, and very unhappy. but that is only because that is where i channel all of that negative energy. much of what i write is not so dark, and actually, it has been getting lighter.

where would i like to see my writing take me? i guess i hadn't really thought about it. i mean, i would be a liar to say i hadn't dreamed of being this great published author, but it is not something i am striving for. i would like to be able to point it out in a book store, but i am not looking forward to the payoff. i think for me, it is more of a confidence thing. i love to write, and i love to interact with other writers. i think that this whole internet sensation of myspace and other such sites, are going to play a very intricate role in how the next line of writers make it to the public eye. and i am looking forward to being a part of it. i hope to begin submitting manuscripts in the very near future.

more than anything, right now i am just focused on getting to know other writers and their styles and techniques.

David Blaine:  Funny, when I was real young the nuns didn't think I could read and I was put with the slow group for reading. But by the time I was in the third grade I had decided I wanted to write. I was reading way ahead of other kids my age by then. I was reading The Hardy Boys mysteries, and Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn, but also Edgar Alan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock.
Some of Poe's stories are a bit over a fourth grader's head, but I asked a lot of questions and kept going. In the fifth grade I wrote a poem. I didn't think it was a big deal. It was an angsty poem and I forgot about it. But my teacher didn't, and one day my dad came home from work with the poem in his hand. I'd gotten some one's attention at the school.

In high school I had some really shitty teachers and a few great ones. I actually had a teacher tell me not to try to write because there was nothing original to write about any more. It'd all been done. But I had another who said I was doing well and stick with it. That's all it took. I knew I was good at this one thing. I sucked in band, I couldn't act, and my drawing and painting skills were strictly for laughs.

I started getting work accepted by magazines and e-zines once I figured out that you need to find a place that publishes your style of writing. One early rejection just said: We don't publish religious work. I never considered my work religious, but I got the message.

I am still expanding as a poet and writer. I am not sure what my ultimate goal is, but I'll know when I achieve it. I know it isn't anything that someone else can give me. An editor may accept my work, but he can't give me validation, that has to come from inside. Readers may send notes admiring what I've done, and that's all good, but it doesn't provide validation either. I've got a thing about Carl Sandburg. When I believe I've written something as Dramatic as Chicago, as scathing as To a Contemporary Bunkshooter, or as beautiful as At A Window, I'll feel validated. Maybe.

Pat King:  There's a key point that all three of you have brought up: starting out writing for yourself. I think this is how a writer should start. I've got a ton of really crappy writing in notebooks that I wrote in high school. I still keep them and one day I want to show them to someone who wants to be a writer as an example of how far a writer can progress. In the beginning, it's not what you write, it's that you write at all.

I like what Aleathia said about a mentor. David, did you have anyone you considered a mentor or did you see your favorite writers as mentors? I think a real-life mentor is something that's very much needed. Mine was a college professor who tore a short story of mine to shreds. In a nice way. He helped me to see what was good about my writing, extract that from all the garbage and really focus on it.

"Weatherman" I could really relate to what you said about being in school and having to hide your writing. Public schools supposedly encourage students to express themselves, but on more than one occasion, I had a "concerned" teacher call my mom up about something I had written......stuff that I was already censoring anyway because I knew they'd try their CIA harassment tactics.

Aleathia, why do you think you didn't have much confidence in your writing until recently.

David, have you been publishing all your life? I get the feeling that you've only recently started publishing your work. If so, why do you think you waited so long?

Leopold McGinnis:  Am I too late to join this conversation? It's fun hearing other people's paths.

My father was a professor and so had an allowance to buy a personal computer when they first came out. My dad bought me what was, at the time, the de rigeur game genre - adventure games, which were basically interactive stories, but you had to collect items and figure out puzzles. But the key element was that they were stories. This inspired me more to write in our creative writing classes in grade 5 more than anything else. Basically I wanted to be a computer game designer, but you can't do that at 12 (especially when all the companies are in the US and Japan) - so the nearest option was a pencil and paper.

Mostly I wrote sci-fi crap, the vast majority completed only in my head, until about junior high when I got into what I can best call strange/gothic writing. Mostly I just liked focusing on being dark, oddball and different. It wasn't inspired by anything in particular - I find my inspiration comes from really random places, and not generally other writing. In high school I took English honours and was disgusted by the whole way of teaching. I received an F for writing an essay on '100 reasons why mark twain was better than shakespeare'. But I began to write more literary things, but still focusing even more on originality/strangeness. Probably what most people would call magic realism. I never know how to label my stuff. I'd never heard of magic realism, nor picked it up off anyone. I was just writing it.

I don't suppose I was writing very 'heartfelt' stories at the time. What most people in the small press community would consider 'true writing' that comes from your own personal experience, although I suppose I was playing out my desire to do everything differently in my writing. In university I started submitting places and, surprisingly, the first place I submitted to accepted my work. It would be a real rarity after that. My third year in university I got frustrated with writing and pretty much deluding myself that I could help change the world with writing. If I really wanted to do that, i should get involved in activism. I got disgusted and pretty much quit for good.

But two years later, after travelling through Asia, with too much time on my hands, I came back to it with a vengence. I got the idea for Game Quest and pretty much wrote it while being unemployed for 7 months in Calgary. My writing became much more personal. I started up www.redfez.net and started submitting again, disgustapointed with the rediculously myopic and visionless publishing process. I've never had much time for 'putting in one's time.' I was pretty much a solitary unknown. I'd hated poetry for the longest time, but redfez got me writing it and now I think it's my stronger stuff. I started a blog (before they were called blogs), which nobody read as I really had no connections, started reading poetry live, got into an artists residency program with a bunch of other stuck-up artist sorts, moved to Toronto and got hooked into the zine scene and the ULA. The ULA was a great connection for me, because suddenly I tapped into, for the first time, a bunch of like minded individuals who felt the same way as me and actually appreciated my work. The ULA was stuck in a funk and, as a lot of people know, several of us broke away to form the the guild of outsider writers which is a pretty fucking exciting group. I think we're breaking some real ground. These days I'm not so concerned about what I write, but am more interested in where this project is going. Also, I really only write for myself now. I guess I always did, but now I realize it, which makes a difference. a BIG one.

Chris Bodor:  With every radio, print, or internet interview I find myself rehashing the made-for-television movie of how the story of Chris Bodor came to be, yet each year the story evolves. Aging like fine wine or over-growing like a neglected flower garden – You decide. Writing poems grew out of a need for me to find a low budget solution to the creative process. Pen and paper equals a finished product poem. Total budget under one dollar. Thousands of dollars are spent on one second of a 30 second television commercial. I made a living working as a technician of film and video productions for four years and I realized at that time that the medium of video was out of my budget for creative hobby pursuits. In 1993, as luck would have it I found myself with myself four years out of college and ready to start a full time job with a New York City art college. Hanging up my freelance belt and taking on a full time commitment also led to another consequence: a three hour round trip train commute. I knew from day one that with this new commute and a stable paycheck there was no excuse to not spend spare time on sharpening my skills as a writer – a passion that I had with me since the age of 10 when I was making comic books. So I signed-up for a free Screenwriting class at my day job (the art school) and I took steps towards writing the next great art film. One of my teachers encouraged me to take my rock journalism background and channel it into my screenplays. My teacher used Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas) and Cameron Crowe (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) who both wrote for Rolling Stone as examples of rock journalists who crossed over to the film. One year later (1994) I found seventy angst soaked poems in my notebook. Some were written in the voice of the movie characters for my script, and some were written from the POV of how I conceptualized the “Everyman”. A few of my first poems were also my attempt to get into the heads of my fellow commuters traveling around me on my daily “train of thought”. The following year, I had 120 poems and the year after that, 160. My output kicked into over =drive because I was asked to host an open microphone hoot-a-nanny at my brother’s newly opened internet coffee shop (alt dot coffee). Every other Thursday for fourteen months I had an automatic audience of five to fifty – sometimes sixty – like minded strangers who were hungry to hear what I had written on the train. I was a natural on the microphone thanks to my college radio experience. All my rock journalism, film script experience, and communication skills melted into my new found writing outlet of poetry and spoken word performing. The open mic series ran its course after a year and a half. That period was my most prolific time. I was constantly writing and rewriting and polishing and fine tuning each word with each reading. I developed an ear and my word with out a doubt began to take on an audio component. I became aware of how a word sounded rather than how it looked on the printed page. I documented the spoken word scene that developed at my brother’s place in my first anthology, simply titled “Alt Dot Spoken Word” (Poetnoise Press, 1997). Three years later I self-published my second and best known anthology “Poetnoise 2000”. This year finds me derailed from 10 years of riding the train and relocated to the beaches of St. Augustine Florida. I am back on track (without a three hour train commute) and collecting poems, prose, and pictures for an anthology on the subject of the lunch break. This will be my third collection and I will be publishing quite a few of the class of Poetnoise 2000. Raindog, Cheryl Townsend, and Catfish McDaris, to name a few. Were going from here? Well after we are done here at the Round Table, I was going to offer to do the dishes and clean-up the kitchen. I think it is my turn. Also, I was thinking of doing the lawn this week, if time allows. It does need a cut.

David Blaine:  Mentors, well, I had that one jr. high teacher who was encouraging. When your an adolescent outsider, I didn't fit in any of the clicks, wasn't a jock, didn't use drugs, etc, a little acceptance goes a long way. In college I had a good writing prof, but it was Carl Sandburg I'd say was my mentor.

I've not read everything Carl ever wrote, that'd almost preclude reading anyone else. But I have read a lot, and a lot about him. I think I've read five biographies including his autobiography and one by his daughter. I've corresponded with Helga, his surviving daughter, but she's not too open to speaking about dad.

I learned a lot about him, what motivated his writing, and why he became popular with the populace when he was an outsider to the poetry establishment of his time.

The long gap between when I started writing and when I started publishing is simple to explain. I sucked. And I didn't really learn how to write better until I got a computer and got on the internet. The site Elite Skills helped a lot. Reading, learning bad and good, bad from good, by example. Reading textbooks on writing, corresponding with poets. I had an opportunity to participate in an online workshop with award winning poets, published poets, MFA's and teachers, for free. It was a pretty good experience, and again, one of them told me I should be getting published regularly. That gave me the confidence to start submitting. My first submission was accepted. That always helps boost confidence, so the eventual rejections didn't hurt so much.

Chris, interesting you mention noting how words sound as opposed to look. Labels aren't much help, but I have noticed some poets are more aurally tuned than visually. I count myself as one of those aural poets.

Aleathia Drehmer:  I hadn't had much confidence in my writing until recently because frankly, most of it sucked. The bulk of poems that I wrote were during a time of rapid change, identity crisis, and multiple moves across the country. I really used poems to capture what was going on in my life. Many of the pieces that I have been writing in the last year are revisions of ideas I had 15 years ago for which I did not have the vocabulary to express myself. I used to feel pressured to have to finish the poem in one sitting, and that editing would disrupt the true feeling and meaning of the poem. I have since changed my technique and am having great success with it.

In the last year, I have come to a very nice and centered place where my vision of things corresponds the words coming out of my pen. I feel like I have finally found my voice. I think having a mentor who is more established in the writing world helps because it gives perspective. I look at some of the writers I have befriended, and I admire the place they have built for themselves with hard work and perseverence...it is inspiring and comforting to know that with some elbow grease and feeling that I might be able to carve out my own slice in the world.

Chris Bodor:  Dave, I actually have been increasing aware of my visual side. Don't forget about my visual start as a film maker. During those early pre-poetry years I under the impression that Charlie Chaplin was the most successful communicator of the 20 th Century because he could make all countries and languages laugh with his brilliant silent films. No language. No words misunderstood in the translation. Growing up with a Hungarian father who spoke English as a second language confirmed my fear that words spoken and written in English could possibly be misunderstood. Message lost. I am actually a visual comedian first, and that is something that I battle with during my journey through adulthood. Everything is not a joke, like I thought it was in high school twenty years ago. As a person who just turned forty, the only thing that is still a joke is the current White House crew. Back to poetry, I have spent the last five years writing acrostic poems similar to the assignment that my kids were bringing home from school. They would hand be a poem made out of the word "FATHER" and I would sit down and create an angst fueled piece out of the letters "TWIN TOWERS". I fell back on my visual upbringing and a solution to writer's block. I was convinced at age 35 that I had written all the free form poems that I could write and I had to make a choice: start rewriting those same poems or scribble a word vertically down a page and meditate and dissect that one word long enough to make a forced poem out of the individual letter that made up the word. It is very cool to show someone a poem and then tell the reader to take a highlighter and yellow the first letter of each line. People jump back. Now with powerpont and other online websites like youtube.com so readily available the next step for me is to create slide shows that highlight this second component of my work from the last five years. The pieces world display the words of the poem then the next power point slide would turn the first letter of each line into a bold font and presto, a second deeper meaning to a seemingly random series of sentences. The next step after that would be to go out and start reading to a live audience one again and turn my performances into multi-media presentations instead of "a wild eyed fried guy at the podium reading stream of conscience words he composed in the same cover torn notebook the day before" type stuff. At that point I will have married a very strong visual style with an equally strong aural component. If given a choice, I would always favor visual because as in Chaplin and Buster Keaton visual messages have the potential to dissolve language barriers and reach the largest potential audience.

Karl Koweski:  Chris Bodor made an excellent point. Growing up, not having much money, writing was the best way to express my creativity. I loved movies probably even more than books but never had access to a camcorder. No paints or canvas. Had a guitar, but tone deafness kept me from anything musical. So if writing was my only option, it's my best option. I love writing just as fiercely now as when i wrote my first story in grade school. I don't know how far I'll be able to go with it. I just want to be able to continue putting pen to paper and improve continuously. I also think Mentors are very important. There was a point toward the tail end of high school when my poems were inspired mostly by Edgar Allen Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jim Morrison, which made for some pretty poor poetry. Dan Nielsen, the editor of Nerve Bundle Review, was the first person to really take the time out to offer criticism and shore up my confidence and help me realize the Lizard King wasn't the best poet out there to emulate. He didn't have to do it. The fact he did made all the difference.

Pat King:  Leopold, your father was a writer, also, wasn't he? Was he a sort of mentor to you? I mean, I'm sure he was in life as all fathers are if they're decent, but did he help with your development as a writer?

It's actually refreshing to learn that Aleathia and David were objective enough to know when they were at a place where their work was ready to be read by the public. I get the feeling that too many writers these days write to see their name attached to something and don't take the time they should becoming a better writer. This especially seems true with a lot of people on myspace. I'll see a person put up a really crappy poem or short story and all their friends will chime in and tell them how great their piece was. Luckily, I see it as a matter of friendship to see that if a friend of mine, if he wants to be a decent writer gets good advice instead of puff-praise. I recently had to tell and old friend from Alabama that she was nowhere near where she should be and that what she had at this point were journal entries and ideas that could be turned into poetry later. Then I did a line by line analysis of her work and made sure to warn her that if she wants to be a writer, she should be prepared to devote her entire life to writing if she wanted to be good at it. You can be a good knitter and keep it as a hobby. But people who write for a hobby don't become good writers. I mean, it sort of has to replace religion in your life. And not the sort of religion where you just go to church on Sundays either. The kind of religion that you feel every second of your life.

Karl, I'd recommend re-reading some of that Jim Morrison. Yeah, some of it is pretty much Rimbaud knockoffs but there are some great mystical archetypes and images in it.

I have a feeling that coming to writing as a poorman's solution to being able to create movies is a phenomenon for the younger generations who didn't grow up reading nearly as much as they consumed movies, especially "blockbusters." Poetplant, Karl and I are all 40 or under and came to literature by way of movies. Although I was a huge reader as a kid (I read the Hardy Boys, Roald Dahl etc) it was movies like Ghostbusters, Star Wars and Indiana Jones that first inspired me to write my own adventure stories.

I think that for a later roundtable we can discuss movies and literature.

Also, Aleathia brought up the idea of finding one's voice as a writer. Personally, there was a pretty black and white line between the time I was a terrible writer and the time I was a good writer. It was a single short story that I wrote. I read it thinking, "I've finally done it." That single short story changed my life because I knew from then on that I could write. I wasn't just fooling myself anymore. I could legitimately say that I was an artist. I'm wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience.

Karl Koweski:  Would that story happen to be "Redneck Kafka", Pat?
I'm looking forward to the roundtable concerning movies and literature.

Aleathia Drehmer:  For me there was not any specific poem or work that made me say "ah ha!", but actually a piece of music that inspired me to write....it pulled from me thoughts and words that I did not know I had inside me, or that I had forgotten about. Last summer, every night at bedtime, I would listen to Christopher O'Riley's "True Love Waits" which is a classical piano version of Radiohead songs. There was something about the arrangements and the passion behind them that made my imagination soar. Half way through the disc, I would have to jump out of bed and write in the half darkness, sometimes in the dark, sometimes reciting them in my head over and over...commiting them to memory. These first poems from this adventure were rejected, I was feeling defeated, but started editing and shaping...listening to the music again to see the images. It was at this point that I felt the turn around, felt the need and desire to make my work into something readable.

Pat, I like the correlation of writing and religion because now that I think about it that way, it is the one thing that moves me everyday besides my kid. I constantly think about words, what they mean, how they are said and the consequence of each sentence because once words are spoken, they can rarely ever be forgotten or taken back.

I too look forward to movies and literature. I love stodgy art pieces....merchant ivory films....going to times I could only dream of, but I am also of the generation for the great adventure films too....but that is for another time.

Pat King:  Actually, Karl, the story in question was not The Redneck Kafka, but a story of mine that was never published. It was never published because I didn't think it was great. It did, however happen to be the story I wrote right before The Redneck Kafka, which I think still stands as my best piece of writing (until my novel is finished, of course!)

That story was really special to me because it was the first one to see print publication. Issue #6 of The Whirligig, I believe. Karl had a story in there too. I recall that I had been talking to Karl via e-mail for a few months to a year before that story came out. If I was really drunk, I might admit that Koweski was a bit of an influence on me too.

David Blaine:  Jesus, I hate it when people come and ask me to critique their poems. I have told people, if no one is commenting maybe it means they don't have anything good to say. Why do you assume no one read it?

But if someone insists, then I tell them the truth. That's usually the last time they ask. And the odd thing is, I will always point out what there was positive while pointing out the problems. Doesn't matter. Truth hurts.

Funny, someone asked me to be their mentor. I suggested they pick a poet to read deeply and maybe study their biography. Last time they asked me for help. I don't have any idea what he wanted.

Oh, I meant to tell you that right out of college I did get paid to write. I wrote columns for the local daily every other  Friday, on their Outdoors page. I wrote where the fish were biting, about taking my kids hunting, that sort of stuff. I wasn't too bad at that type of writing, good enough to get invited and a paycheck too. The creative stuff took longer to polish.

Leopold McGinnis:  Actually it was kind of the reverse way with my dad!! I started showing my family my writing (I kept it all to myself before that - I'm pretty reserved about showing my stuff, and that's something I've had to work on almost as much as my writing). Then a couple years later, after he had triple bypass surgery, he started writing poetry and I was all 'who is this old stuff prof who suddenly writes poetry?' He later told me that I inspired him to start writing, which he'd always fantasized about doing, and to grow a beard, after I grew one in high school! So that was kind of weird.

But he was much more sensible about it, joined writers groups, started putting his stuff out there, was getting published. So when I came back and got into his writing groups they were doing a lot of good stuff that I think changed what I was writing. I can credit my dad for most of my finally being able to 'understand' poetry. Then after he died, too, and I was going through all his stuff I found out that he'd really been into writing in his twenties and had written some things, but then gave up on it. So perhaps he inspired me in a lot of ways that I didn't realize until way after I was doing a lot of writing.

I think I was much more inspired by movies, etc... than books. But then you turn to a book and I think the difficulty for modern writers is turning these filmic images into a very rigid, textual form. I like what the others are saying about 'economies of scale'. There's a beauty to the fact that all you need to write is a pen and paper. In fact, you don't even need that - you can do that in your head even. But then again, because of that, everyone can write (and every other household has someone who 'writes'), so there really is no way we can have a large market beyond our friends. It takes hollywood millions of dollars and thousands of man hours to produce one movie - so there is a lot more incentive and push and creative power and money behind those, and less market 'saturation' which makes them successful. It also means that 99.9% of the world that thought up a cool movie idea will never get to participate in making one. I think the lesson to be learned in that is that writing is a solitary, small scale thing and we shouldn't be panicking about the fact that it's not, or trying to make it something huge and universal.

Chris Bodor:  Mister Karl Koweski, I feel that it is worth mentioning that like your guitar ... I also had the desire to play an instrument but failed something fierce on the alto saxophone. To date the only instrument that I have been able to play well is the radio. All my friends growing up were garage band musicians and I became a boy with a music video production dream and the world's biggest fan. Music moves me and flows through me.

Michael Grover:  I come from Florida. A very working class family. My father is still a socialist union worker, and my mother is a souther babtist. I think my dad got to raise me and my mom got to raise my sister. I was born in West Palm Beach, pretty much raised in Lake Worth. I always wrote. There was not a lot to push my writing in Florida so I did my own zines to get my writing out. Everyone else always said they would contribute and I always ended up doing the zines alone. I was in a punk rock band and toured the country in the back of a van. I decided there were cooler places and I did not want to stay in Florida. I packed everything I could get in my car and drove to Los Angeles. I went up I-95 to Jacksonville and then got on I-10 there which took me across the country to Los Angeles. My girlfriend had a weekly reading that she went to in some guys living room. It was the first time I had ever read my stuff. This guy Shawn told me about Larry Jaffe's Poetic Licence reading that was in Pasadena. I started going there every Tuesday and that was it. I just fed on the energy and the enthusiasm for poetry. That was where I belonged. Around that same time I was reading a lot of Bukowski and Fante which was really having a profound effect on me being in the same area, and walking around the same places. Larry gave me my first feature and I started working really hard. Rehearsing for it, writing new stuff. The feature was right after Larry had moved the reading to Hollywood. We were in the back room of the Moondog Cafe. I had printed my first chapbook for the reading and everything. There were two features that night and the girl I was reading with was supposed to be a lot better than me so Larry had me read first. When I was done reading the girl just threw her hands up and left and said she could not follow that. After that Larry took me under his wing for a while and made me his assistant. He would usually have me read first in the open mic to set the energy and pace for the night. I learned a lot from Larry I did. Eventually I left LA. I came back to Florida to save money then I moved to Philadelphia. Philadelphia was not LA. I hosted my first reading there. At the world famouse Five Spot that recently burned down. The co-host Natalie was a bartender there so she set it up. When she quit they cancelled the reading and we ended up moving it to the Friends Meetinghouse which was a huge churchlike venue. I was working with some loudmouthed guy named Karl Wenclass who I always tried to avoid to be honest. Somehow he ended up going to a reading with me one night and seeing me perform. Suddenly Karl had a new vision for his literary group The ULA who at the time was all prose writers. I was to be the first poet in the ULA and in the upcoming show in Chicago me and my friend Frank Walsh would have a great read off. I was not crazy about the idea but Karl was very persuasive. His goal was to find the next Kerouac and I was him. The reading in Chicago did not go that well and Karl blew up afterwards. Soon after we got back to Philly I was trying to distance myself from him. I ended up leaving Philly, now I am more in the country of Florida. I host a reading twice a month at the local coffee shop in Port Saint Lucie. That is pretty much where I have been and where I am at.

Chris Bodor:  Mister McGinnis - Do I understand corrrectly that your beard growing days in high school inspired your own father to grow a beard after he had a near death experience. If that is correct then that is so cool. I do remember that my mother wrote moonjunspoon verse in a marble notebook that I found in high school. Reading her emotional, pick poor words in that notebook inspired me NOT to write similar spoonmoonjune type verse. Later, Chris@3P

Pat King:  Hey, thanks a lot everyone for your participation. I'm going to go ahead and wind this one up.  We're still tossing around the ideas for next week's topic, so it'll be a surprise! We'll start it up bright and early on Monday! Thanks again and see you then!

Last update : 24-11-2007 22:31

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