(Images provided by the Drifter; view carefully!)

“Yes: writing has done much harm to writers.” – Oscar Wilde

“I had a girl / Now she’s gone / She left town / Town burned down / Nothing left / But the sound / Of the front door closing / forever.” – Warren Zevon

…And then sitting on the porch The Drifter opined to the two who were there with him:

I was given some of the worst advice about writing I’ve ever received in some of the “best” writing programs in the entire Midwest. The American Midwest, roughly defined, has over three hundred degree-granting writing programs currently, both undergraduate and graduate, in Spring 2026. It was similar back then. The Midwestern Gothic is a fuel for many muses, both half-hearted and fiery. One in five Americans are defined as Midwesterners which means we are a looked-down-upon minority even though we’ve produced many of the greatest American writers, like Twain and Hemingway, Hart Crane, Saul Bellow, Robert Bly, James Wright, and Lorine Niedecker. And messy “Honest” Abe Lincoln, the pipe-smoking mercury pill addict who spent most of his time on the road with his horse because he found his manic-depressive wife intolerable on a daily basis.

I received the worst advice I’ve ever received from the most famous novelist I ever worked with. He tried to steal both my women at different times and at the same time at two different parties; drank all my liquor while saluting me; destroyed my manuscripts by spilling wine on them and burning them with cigarettes (“accidentally”); and said he was helping me. He told me not to take five pages describing a character walking across the street. He said not to describe eyes. And he provided a whole mishmash of other rotten advice that ruined an entire novel of mine. I didn’t know any better at the time. I never knew how long it would take me to really find my own voice, either. This writer, still living and producing at 72 right now, had created two minor New York Times best-sellers (one novel and one nonfiction book) back then and worked as a script writer in Hollywood for a few years. He was well-connected to such well-known literary writers as Jim Harrison, Harry Crews, Barry Lopez, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, William Gay, and Thomas McGuane, to name a few: or so he claimed. He never came close to scoring on either one of my aristocratic underclass Ladies, as unfamous and oft’-intoxicated as I happened to be, which made me half-different from him. Both of these drama queen heartbreakers had their own side activities so they couldn’t blame me, thought I, though they both tried to anyway. This kind of histrionic performance took up a lot of time. Drinking and smoking beloved cigarettes while driving my little car was one of my favorite activities along with the music I played and I was constantly looking out for the police in a relaxed way, whether it was fighting and loud music at night, the purchase of not-exactly-legal substances or drinking and driving, which I always did in a condition of chilled-out, laser-like focus which could not be dented by alcohol consumption. My occupation was Professional Pizza Delivery Person. I left my shifts with fistfuls of cash. They couldn’t track you by cell phone back then. Of the twenty or so drivers at the store, twenty or so were males. About half were either Hindu or Muslim. There were many long discussions about religion around the ovens with cigarettes being shared and sometimes marijuana. One of the job’s key features was the potential to get either jumped, mugged, or robbed or all three at once so I was always looking out for the thieves and gangbangers as well as the police. It was another era of course and I do not recommend it but it worked for me at the time, “it” meaning the drinking and driving and running around. I didn’t go to the gym but I got tons of exercise, often too much. I had bottles hidden everywhere I lived and didn’t live, in couch cushions, in basements, in backs of cupboards, in desk drawers, behind bookshelves, under the bed, in the bushes, behind the garage, and beneath the car seats, to name a few. Keeping up my own supply of both liquor and cigarettes often took constant struggle and effort but scoring these items produced the looked-for joy every single time, cigarettes included. Got my mojo back, friend! Every cigarette I ever lit whether it was accompanied by strong, hot, black coffee, hard liquor, or air, was a love affair. It was a time when motels were cheap, diner food was good, and cheap, books, cigarettes, and alcohol were affordable and there was more than one good novelist being regularly published.

What was good about the writing programs, for me, was an unparalleled camaraderie that touched the heights of the beat writers in America and stayed there. Wichita, Kansas, and Chicago, Illinois, were lit on fire by us and we burned down both towns. And then, behind us, the towns burned down. And that developing alcoholism that would shape my life for good and ill. And all you beautiful women (enough said here) who broke my heart gradually and then suddenly. And great libraries. Somehow I never stopped reading, never. Hours daily before the bars and sometimes in the bars. And two or three days a week, all night and all day, reading. Falling asleep on the floor with one’s head in the book. And it was good again to see your friends after such self-educating seclusion. There were also trips to New York City. One time the plane almost went down. Another time we arrived in a different car than we left in, which would be a novella-length tale if all the important details were included. In NYC, I usually stayed with a friend in a cockroach-infested tenement across from Tompkins Square Park that had a guy who looked like Lou Reed sitting on the stoop 24/7, bottle in hand and sunglasses hiding the truth even at night. And I was young. Not too young, not very young, but young enough that I look back there now with longing. Not a torturous longing, more like a sweet longing that sometimes turns painful. Aging is for the birds and birds are poets. Our complicated, interconnected, lonely, over-evolved, over-commercialized, over-advertised, alienating, and fractured society where nothing of importance appears and nothing stays for a day or an hour happens to produce late-blooming artistic geniuses in out-of-the-way places. Walt Whitman, following Ralph Waldo Emerson, wanted the American writer to spread and not be only an exclusive East Coast thing. They have done so.

My talent in fiction-writing was cramming a character’s head with thoughts and their heart with feelings and eschewing the formal outward trappings of a mechanical plot device even though there was plenty of drama going on beneath the surface, or so I believed. Writing in no genre, in other words, straight from life, just like I took the Jack Daniel’s straight as well (or the lines of cocaine). I learned it first and foremost from James Joyce, who took it from Laurence Sterne and Francois Rabelais, among others, who I later also learned from, and Bob Dylan was also a massive and messy (in the best senses) influence on my style, of both life and writing. I was advised not to do it, then told not to do it, then asked not to do it by a couple of big-name folks in New York City, both an agent and a publisher. But I couldn’t not do it. “Write the other way I cannot,” said Melville, meaning he couldn’t write the formulaic, crap, restricted, hack way. Not will not. Cannot. And then will not, too. It may stem from an overactive critical imagination, an imagination which is only increased by drug use, if you target and restrict that use. There is a difference between deliberate, targeted usage and the sloppiness and self-pity of abuse. And a million gradations to be explored in writing at another time. When I was a teenager Pete Townshend was often my idea of what a writer was, along with Dostoevsky and always Shakespeare (still) as well as King David of Bible fame (his psalms, and his psychological slaying of the monster Goliath). Right now (at this moment and often at other moments) I believe the dead writer I resemble most is TED BERRIGAN, especially Ted in his fourteen-line poem masterpiece, “Whitman in Black.”

I’m old enough now to know that the slick party-going folks who run the book industry desire formulaic, commercialized, seen-before, dressed-up-as-if-new, recognizable products – cheap products. Products they can sell. You usually can’t sell what no one has ever seen before but it’s the only way to produce something original, too. The Irish weekly paper that commissioned James Joyce (for a pittance) to write the series of stories for what later became Dubliners stopped publishing his stories because they received too many complaints from all the faint-hearted readers. Good Christians, so-called. It took him ten years to find a publisher after the book was finished. It is a candidate for the greatest short story collection in the English language of all time, or it just is that. Other candidates include In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor but of these three for me Dubliners rules though the other two are so close. One of the bars we used to drink in in Chicago was called THE JAMES JOYCE. We rode the train and burned it down. Another one was called: NINE MUSES. Also THE FIELD HOUSE, BIG SKY and ALBERT’S PLACE. And dozens, literally, of other bars. More books than bars but many, many bars. While in NYC, we drank at the WHITE HORSE TAVERN because of Dylan Thomas.

I also wrote dozens of short stories while in the writing programs. Every single one was a piece of juvenilia. I banged them out on the computer while smoking and drinking either liquor or coffee or both and at least half of them were over fifty pages long. I’d show up late at the writing workshop smelling like smoke and liquor and with fifteen copies of a fifty-page story ready to hand everybody with a grin on my face. And sometimes I’m so quiet they think I’m autistic. It’s artistic, Mister. And Ma’am.

No one wanted to read it. I didn’t care. Which isn’t quite true. But isn’t untrue, either.

When I was 46 years old I became a poet. The story of how that happened cannot be told. Yet. It is only of interest, I suppose, if you’re interested in the writing life as participant or observer. All you who are already studying your own process. Jesus said, Only those can understand who already know. The rest are the proverbial swine you’re not supposed to throw your pearls in front of, harsh as it sounds. There are thousands upon thousands of well-known and/or well-paid writers (which is very often not the same thing at all) who don’t know, and by “don’t know” I mean don’t know what’s important. Or care. Some day The Drifter will write a further analysis of why their crap is crap. Mostly, half the time, I was just happy to have survived, I think…

(TO BE CONTINUED. This sort of thing could go on for years. The official title for this specific series is THE DRIFTER CONFESSIONS.)

WRITING ADVICE: Make it a lifelong (right up until the end) goal instead of a short-term payout and it will never leave you. Reading and writing are two sides of the same golden literary coin, far more precious than literal jewels. According to Harold Bloom, the literary is the personal and the Personal IS Literary. Even for those who don’t know it. It is manifestly NOT an elitist thing: while also being only for the few with the strongest hearts.

The Drifter