I heard that Edward Albee was giving a workshop at the Omega Institute. I attempted to sneak in using my press credentials, but Omega politely explained that "all the slots are filled." So I resolved to meet Albee at his book-signing following the workshop, at the Omega bookstore. As I walked up, an older man and two younger men climbed the steps of the bookshop. I … [Read more...]
(Part II) Alison Winfield-Burns memoir
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. Here are all the installments: Part I · Part II · Part III · Part IV · Part V · Part VI 2. Dark-Eyed Brunette (continued) Let me get straight to the … [Read more...]
(Part I) The School(girl) of Disembodied Poetics by Alison Winfield-Burns
This is the first excerpt of six. Here are all of the installments: Part I · Part II · Part III · Part IV · Part V · Part VI “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 … [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 friend, Marisa in Portland and talked with strangers on topics as varied as politics, love, and the proper rotation of corn crops … [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 railroad cars: hardwood floors shined the whole length of the apartment, from the cubby for shoes off the stairwell to a … [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 those days. “Even in bad times people, they got to eat,” he said in his thick Yiddish accent that sounded singsong. Besides, he … [Read more...]
Being There – Michelle Bracken
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 to day drudgery among cacti and overwhelming heat. It would be my mother, my five-year-old sister, and me. We were leaving … [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 of Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, and River Phoenix combined, whose good looks and quiet demeanour had me transfixed at every … [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. Who knows what dreams mean when the body is this white waxing flesh or white waning flesh, pale or bright and orbiting … [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, accompanied him on his lagoon inspections, and served as whipping boys should he need to vent. I hated going. I always thought he … [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 dog. I began to shake. My father was so menacing that when he gave an order if you didn’t follow it, his big fist would … [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 several times a day. Since he moved with his parents to Tampa for their retirement, however, the path has atrophied. It has invited … [Read more...]
Dearly Beloved, Part I: Growing up in 1950s San Francisco
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. They buy the church. It promises walls galore for hanging their growing bodies of artwork. The basement Sunday School … [Read more...]
Sleevelessness
My mom’s job is to sit on a stool in our basement. Thatʼs where her art studio is. She has a drawing table there that has a square leaned-up top and ink stains all around the edges. When she’s not making her own art, my mom draws fashion illustration ads for the San Francisco Chronicle Newspaper, and for the Joseph Magnin Department Store. She makes pictures of all the … [Read more...]
On Painting On
“Why are the paintings going away?” Mommy explains: ”Your dad is having a very important one-man show at a big fancy gallery across from The San Francisco Opera House. We're going to get all dressed up and attend the opening.” I get to go and not wear my pajamas with feet. The grown-ups that belong to my friends will be there, the City Lights poets, the artists we … [Read more...]
El Condor Pasa
All my life I’ve been surrounded by paintings of cowboys. Longer still, I’ve been surrounded by people who wanted to be cowboys. Sometimes I count the paintings, the cowboys. There’s my grandparents’ acrylic that hung above their couch of a man, close to death slouched on his horse, reaching towards the mirage of water in the horizon. There’s the man with broad hat and bolo tie … [Read more...]
From Motown to Mowtown
An obsession with polished aspirational black music finally carried me to Detroit. I had come to rediscover the heartbreak of first love and unearth a few last Okeh "cover ups". Poking my nose against a high window in the MGM Grand Hotel I survey this strung out city constructed on the lands of the People of the Three Fires. Michigan Central looms in front of me, the morose … [Read more...]
The Poetry of Walking
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” ― Mary Oliver Would you like to journey down a path that will help conjure creative insight? A common premise in Taoism is, in the literal sense, that Tao means Path, a road that … [Read more...]
With Crooked Legs of Hackberry
At 21, I traveled through India for six months. My world-view had been scrambled, and writing about my travels helped me unscramble it. I had never seen people starving on the streets, their limp bodies scooped up in the morning by a front-end loader. I had never been surrounded by large groups of beggars or lepers. Nobody had ever pushed into my face a live cobra curled in a … [Read more...]
Irishry
When I moved to San Pedro one of the welcome signs was learning that an established family of iron workers with my name lived here. The rumor was that one of its younger members hung at Walker's Café out on Point Fermin and had my exact name. My mother, a devoted gene-tracer, never mentioned a strain of our family that thrived in these parts. So I was very curious. And … [Read more...]
This High
My first attempt at rolling a joint was rather pathetic. It looked more like a small turd covered in paper than something to be smoked. And not knowing to remove the twigs and seeds — of which it had many — the loosely rolled number disconcertingly popped and crackled each time I took a hit of it. Was there something wrong with the pot? Had I been ripped off by the dropout with … [Read more...]
London 1966: I.T., the Camel, and a Song Named Me
The camel’s unexpected appearance saved me. The raggedy texture of his fur, his massiveness, and his breath were all undeniably real, no matter how bizarre the setting and cast of characters. Snaking black power cords connecting reporters to brilliant artificial light, long-armed microphones and BBC television cameras did not trip his feet as they did mine. The night could not … [Read more...]
Becoming Jill Kerouac
It all started with the word. Not THAT word. But a word — or a string of words, rather — that struck me: There are no Jack Kerouacs or Holden Caulfields for girls. Literary girls don’t take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men. (Kelsey McKinney) As a freshly-minted English major with a semester’s study abroad, a few recreational trips to Central … [Read more...]
Jenny Lynn
Cold wind is building and ready. It is not understood the pent feelings that have suddenly surfaced after long and even further back and then along the slow moving world and probably before the long awaited return of a Gypsy night. She said her name was Jenny Lynn. WAIT. Let me think. It was in the south section grid just beyond the usual spot where did we usually wait … [Read more...]
Hear That Lonesome Whistle
I started drinking while the Wyoming sky was pink and you could still see forever. Earlier that day I found just enough smack to keep me from being sick. It got me moving. It got me out in the sun. It was the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, my mom’s birthday. I met John for drinks at the Albany, by that time the sky became over-ripened and the stars … [Read more...]
