here are a few writing projects in my life that are terribly difficult and slogging. These projects have already consumed vast amounts of my time over many years. And yet they have distant horizons before they approach publication. And worst of all, they seem to place a great restriction on my ability to complete more short writing works such as poetry and songs, and the ability to experiemnt with music and film more deeply. Nonetheless, it has always been my nature to work in a wide array or things at once. Thus each thing I do is hindered by others.
A Beat Literary Work about "Illigitimate" Children
Although I am by no means a master of famous literature, I am attempting to build what I hope to be one of the most socially valued literary journals of all time. I intend it to be a fictionalized account based almost completely on factual events from experience and direct association. This work in progress strives to be potent, powerful, overwhelming, deeply touching and everything you might find in an epic famed work such as Les Miserable by Victor Hugo or Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It will take shape in a unique and boldly fast-moving style through a richly vivid wealth of memories. My own poetic inclusions will likely be used to break up the story.
I want to share with my readers some of the details about this long term project and its methodology. First, I must preface by telling you that the project is somewhat deliberately secretive in order that its impact upon release will hopefully not become muted by excess online visibility. The work has a title that I am keeping unpublished and confiding only verbally to certain confidents and associates. That secret title came to me in a long-sought moment of inspiration many years after I had begun to construct this literary work. It is a powerful title, the kind that all writers dream to find, and hopefully will become an equally powerful work.
The work itself has nothing to do
with beat cults or beat poets, but rather it is
a story born out of a most stark and beat condition
in the classic Herbert Huncke definition. It is
a story about the lives of many abused, neglected,
and delinquent children connected through the central
story of one person, a child of the 1950s and 60s.
The difference between my work and so many that
may have fallen short in this literary genre, is
that my characters will, for the most part, be hugely
lovable, adventurous, dynamic, humanly beautiful
and potently tragic. I'm talking about children
of the streets, runaways, delinquents, illigitimate
kids, car thieves, train hoppers, pranksters, shoplifters,
paint sniffers, drug addicts, alcoholics, orphans,
children who were punched in the gut by experience,
children of suicide and at least two street urchins
who were shot dead in cold blood in a doorway of
a downtown building. All of this will be intimately
set along the canals, railroads and back streets
of a smoke-filled midwestern factory town of the
American industrial heartland amidst its heyday
in the 1960s. If all goes well, nothing will stop
the reader except perhaps an occasional scene of
stupendous tragedy. These lives are swept ruthlessly
into adulthood and direct assimilation into hypercharged
turbulence of the now bygone baby boom youth generation,
a world filled with myriad drugs and social-political
upheavel, all of which which will be laid out in
graphic detail.
I intend to deliver characters and events that might bring some readers to tears. But these characters would not be inclined to seek or accept pity. There will be many moments of divine comedy, primarily in the form of mischeif. But more importantly, the reader will feel a sense of great truths unfolding in these experiences.
Characters, Situations and Locations
The heart of the story occurs in a large orphanage
where a boy spends the third five years of childhood
(ages 10 to 15). Despite this situation, the boy
is neither unloved, nor an orphan. His mother, a
young and delicatele young woman from France, is
a major character in the story, having been denied
all paternal rights ever since her divorce when
the boy is five. From age six to ten, the boy lives
in a rural foster home where he is tormented by
a Catholic foster mother. She is married with two
of her own daughters and two foster sons. This antagonist
will be one of the most outrageous characters in
the story as she lays down a regiment of cruel and
psychopathic abuses to the boys including severe
beatings, physical tortures bondage, humiliations,
constant verbal abuse and the cruel destruction
of gifts sent by the boy's mother. I intend to portray
some of these abuses including one beating that
occurs in terrifying flashes of lighting and thunder
in the rural blackness where the boy is roped and
pummeled savagely in drenching rain. Amidst all
of this, there is constant indoctrination in Catholic
scripture as the woman hopes to groom the kid into
an altar boy. On one occasion, nuns at the school
become suspicious after the boy arrives nearly frostbitten
after being forced to walk miles to school half
dressed in deep snow. Finally, at the height of
her insanity, the foster mother sexually molests
the boy, who is damaged for life by the experience,
replayed in flashbacks throughout life. Amidst all
of this, the boy has only a relationship of letters
and visits from his real mother. The other foster
son is equally tormented. The abusive woman is a
leader in the Catholic community. The memories formed
in this foster home continue to torment the boy
long after the abuse ends. One year later, the boy
arrives at the orphanage. Here, he begins to form
complex relationships with other boys and girls
but is eventually devastated when he is unable to
reunite with mother or family of any kind.
The Method for
This Work in Four Stages
- Personal Research - Given that this fiction is based on true events and actual people, it has become a deeply plodding and difficult endeavor to get through the first and most trying stage. That would be the prerequiste research that serves as the foundation or basis for the untold story. So far, the research has required a vast amount of correspondence, archival searches, interviews, photogaphy, video, the locating of long gone-children both dead and alive, and dealing with an ever-expanding base of new knowledge that provides potential for a greater overall story. There is also a significant amount of difficult travel involved in this research, mainly to the setting where the story is birthed.
- Interactive Participation - Once the bulk of initial research is accomplished, I intend to create a web site that will attempt to reunite some of the long-scattered and grown children, as a means to gather more of their stories. This stage is supplementary given that many children have been located and interviewed. But some of the critical children have yet to be found.
- Timeline Assembly - This final product is not intended to become a documentary. Nonetheless, I must construct an elablorate and excessively comprehensive and photo-illustrated chronology. This doumentary will be the comprehensive picture that I will use to assemble the literary master work.
- The Writing
- In actuality, I could write this work in a few
months if I began today. But I choose to take
the long hard path for the sake of slowly distilling
the ultimate path of impact and nuance. Years
from now, perhaps long before the above three
stages are complete, I hope to gain much momentum
into writing the work in my own literary and poetic
style. I plan to take some minor cues from the
works of great writers. But I intend to deliver
every sentence in my own unique way. One unresolved
issue is the sequential order I will use for events
of the story. Most stories begin at the beginning.
But this one might begin at its ending.
The Expected Result
I am treating the project as the most challenging writing work of my life. It is self-demanding to the extreme. I'd much rather focus on songwriting, poetics and performance than getting so bogged down in this. I've already spent many years involving hundreds if not thousands of hours just to give the project its initial momentum. I plan to work this project like a great sculpture. I hope to test the final manuscript through an audience of peers before I write the final draft. At a minimum, even if this might fail to find a global audience interest, it should at least meet the threshold of becoming a cult classic.
