This excerpt contains the middle of Chapter 2 through the beginning of Chapter 5, starting with childhood and going up to Alison's arrival in the early 1980s at the Kerouac School. To get caught up, read the first installment of The Jack Kerouac … [Read more...]
The Jack Kerouac School(girl) of Disembodied Poetics (Part I): an excerpt from Alison Winfield-Burns’ memoir
“I wrote my memoir at the request of my sweetheart Sam, who said he wanted to ‘know all.’ My original intent was to laud my/our Beat poet friends and teachers from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics circa 1980ish, yet as my betrothal to Sam … [Read more...]
Spring in Cascadia
Ten days in the northwestern bit of the USA - a sort of slow-paced quick visit to a part of the world I've wanted to see for so long. On the way, I managed to spend five days with my friends Tim and Stephanie in Bellingham, hiked with my sister's … [Read more...]
A Higher State
In nineteen sixty-eight I was part of a Hindu meditation group that included Allen Ginsberg. Earlier, Jack Kerouac and others had brought an awareness of Buddhism into popular culture. A flood of influence was coming from the east. At the core of it was … [Read more...]
Plain Sight
Behind a scarred metal door, painted red and inset with two locks that opened to keys in shapes I never saw in the States, including one that looked like the Philips head screwdriver on my old swiss army knife, my Lviv apartment was laid out like gilded … [Read more...]
The Seed
The sun beat down on my parents’ black Olds as they drove south to their honeymoon in Florida. It was 1937. My father could easily have afforded a new car which cost $540 then. He made plenty of money in the grocery store he owned in Jackson Heights in … [Read more...]
Finding Indonesia
After four years as an expat here in Indonesia, with permanent residence status and no idea of turning back, I might be able to say a few things about this extraordinary country, a country made up of seventeen thousand islands stretching three thousand … [Read more...]
Being There
Summer, 2004 We had never gone away together, never taken a vacation. My mother had always been too busy cleaning houses, changing diapers, and dating worthless men. But she made time, one summer, for us to go somewhere, be somewhere and escape our day … [Read more...]
Subterranean Boy
There was a time that I fell in love once: with life, slowly with myself, and with a beautiful boy who completely turned my world upside down. A beauteous man child who taught me about life and love and artistic vision as salvation, a stunning combination … [Read more...]
All Night You Dream of Ice and In the Morning Wake to a Skiff of Snow
After all these weeks of rain and gray, the sky a fitted sheet on the too bulky mattress of mass, last night there were white blossoms in the trees and snow on the earth and your hair grew long and light-filled and you rode through town on a polar bear. … [Read more...]
The Only Man in the World
DADIO SPLIT FOR MOLOKA’I every weekend to supervise his Puko’o project. He was certain his pick-and-shovel laborers and heavy equipment operators were slacking off. I took turns with Troy, my big brother, serving as his assistant. We carried luggage, … [Read more...]
Under His Roof
At 19, just out from under my father’s roof, I was in an antique shop, a secondhand shop really, eyeing a copper teakettle. “Sit!” the owner said sharply. I sat. Then I saw a large dog, a Standard Poodle, behind me. The owner had been talking to his … [Read more...]
The Incredible Shrinking Man
For a long time now I have wanted to write about how aging affects our appetite for life, how it constricts our activities and shrinks our comfort zone and our energy level. I have been thinking about it now and again, when I get around to it. Thinking … [Read more...]
Marshmallow Forest
Mud hardens on my combat boots as I step behind my sister through the sickle of woods dividing her property from her neighbors. The son of the previous owners, born intellectually disabled and fond of motors, rode a four-wheeler across this pathway … [Read more...]
Dearly Beloved, Part I
In San Francisco, a handsome old Lutheran Church is for sale. My "Beat Generation", progressive, bohemian, intellectual, Jewish, left-leaning, scholarly, non-conformist, art professor parents, Leonard and Helen Breger, are deeply devout prolific artists. … [Read more...]
