(Images provided by DWB)

“I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.” – Bob Dylan

The person in these pictures is a poet in action.

She’s a poet and she does know it, but she does not show it, at least not in any overt kind of way (or hardly ever).

She’s 18 now, recently graduated from high school (she went to Hemingway’s high school), and she tried the poet clubs and poet readings at the school.

But she couldn’t really stand any of them.

Because she is horrified by any sort of insincerity. She can even feel it approaching before it’s there. For her, insincerity is akin to the proverbial fingernails screeching across a chalkboard. For her, most formal poetry readings and poet gatherings and poet clubs, and so forth, have the same sincerity value as Amber Heard’s testimony at the Johnny Depp trial which she, like her father, could not stand watching because of how blatantly insincere, false, and totally FAKE it obviously was.

(We were watching the trial because we’re Johnny Depp fans, big ones. And even though I couldn’t stand watching Amber make a fool of herself, or maybe because I couldn’t stand watching her make a fool of herself, she reminds me very much (physically included) of someone I once knew (and dated, and almost married), a stage actress and theater professor from Chicago, Illinois, which has more theater than any other place in the country except NYC).

To be a professional academic poet in the USA of today, one has to give professional poetry readings, and attend professional poet gatherings, and join poetry clubs, 99.999% of which have about as much sincerity as the testimony of Amber Heard at the Johnny Depp trial.

Hemingway, as a famous writer, was terrified of formal public speaking, so much so that he rarely, or never, did it.

Bukowski, Hemingway’s most famous direct heir, gave the greatest poetry readings of any poet in American history.

He could hold an audience of hundreds in the palm of his hand for hours. Almost literally.

And yet he hated doing it – hated it unto the death; because he said it made him feel like a fake, a freak, and a fraud.

The person in these pictures is a poet, but she almost never shows it, not in any overt way. (Although if you’re a sensitive human who’s a good judge of character and an artist, or artistically inclined, you may be able to tell it from a single glance.)

(Images provided by DWB)

“You’ll find it when you stop looking.” – D.W. Barrigar

At 18, she doesn’t quite know it yet, but the way she walks, the way she talks, the way she thinks, and the way she acts all indicate one thing: writer.

Just who and what a writer is now is undergoing great flux and change, great challenges and readjustments. It’s been happening very dramatically since around the year 2000. We live in a period of rapid and sudden uncertainty, and we, of course, don’t know how things will pan out.

Edgar Allan Poe, it’s often said, was the first American writer who actually tried to make a living from his pen and nothing but his pen.

He failed miserably, had to work mostly as an editor instead, and died in the gutter because of it.

Before that, it wasn’t as if America didn’t have writers. Most people wrote and read letters, for instance, every day. (If they were “illiterate,” they dictated their letters and had letters from others read aloud to them from someone around them who could read and write.) It was simply the case that making a living as a creative writer was fairly unheard of. There were zero copyright laws at that time, among other reasons, many other reasons.

Geoffrey Chaucer, of England, author of the Canterbury Tales, is considered the first actual, individual author in the English language, in the modern sense. (Rome and other societies had their own versions much earlier than that.)

And making a living as a writer, as nothing more than a writer, never crossed Chaucer’s mind.

He had a million other jobs instead, while also completing the most lasting work in the English language outside of Shakespeare. And we all know how Shakespeare supported himself.

So even if she never publishes a word, and even as she also does other things, too, this is a writer in action – not tomorrow, not in a few years or decades, now.

America thinks everything is about money.

The best-seller mentality has poisoned the well of the minds of so many writers that many, or even most, of them have stopped writing seriously even as they still dream of writing.

I taught in the writing schools of the Midwestern USA for over twenty years, first as a graduate student, later as a professor and lecturer.

It gradually dawned on me that there was a mindset that was killing the creativity of many of my students.

Too many of them believed that if they didn’t become rich and famous writers overnight, then they weren’t writers at all.

And they quit doing it. They stopped writing. Because they thought the lack of instant “success” meant they weren’t good enough. So they bowed out, with embarrassed smiles on their faces. It was sad to see, sad that so many had (and still do) fallen for the lie. The big lie.

Writing, creative writing, is something you do if you’re called to it. Any outward success, or lack of so-called outward success, is never going to stop you if you’re a real writer.

We are all writers today, in many ways, inventing personas for ourselves, using words to text and email each other all the time every single day.

Jesus was a writer, even though he never wrote a word, except one known time, with his finger in the sand.

But who told more lasting, wide-ranging stories than he did? Short stories, usually very, very short stories, so powerful they turned him into the most famous human being who’s ever lived or ever will live – bar none. It was his words that did everything, including bringing back the dead. (“Lazarus, come out!”) And that makes him a writer. He was never paid a pittance for it, not even a single cent, ever, not even one time.

(He was never directly paid, but he was given free food, lodging, and wine from his audiences and hearers.)

The person in these pictures is a writer in action, even if she doesn’t quite know it yet, even if she never “publishes” a word.

“Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free,” wrote Kris Kristofferson.

(Cool images provided by DWB)

(Co-Ed note–We once again proudly present another high quality and brilliant “fictional essay” by Co-Editor Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar. This is extra special because it makes its world debut, right about…now!–LA)

“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” – Hemingway

DISCLAIMER: The advice in this essay isn’t for everyone.

It’s up to the Reader to decide whether you’re one of those this was meant for, directly, indirectly, or not at all.

Part One.

In private notes that were discovered and released after his death, the great psychologist Carl Jung pointed out that there are two ways of consuming drugs, i.e. (in this case) illegal substances, or alcohol (a hardcore drug if there ever was one).

The first way involves bombing out your mind, becoming numb, killing your spirit, getting wasted, forgetting about life, escaping your responsibilities as a human among humans and other living things, and so forth.

This is the mode that gets all the press in the modern US, even with (or especially with) two revered comedians such as Mr. Cheech and Mr. Chong.

But the second way, much less popular and much less talked about and much less believed in, too, is much different.

And the second way can be called the true way.

The second way is the way of the shaman, the way of the mystical monk or nun, the way of the spiritual seeker.

The second way was and is the way which can be symbolized by seven representative American writers (at their best, only at their best), none of whom died shockingly young from drugs or anything else, except Kerouac (at 47): William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bob Dylan (among many other heroes).

The first way involves deadening yourself – putting yourself to sleep.

The second, much less popular way, involves a search for enlightenment, the seeking after an awakening, the belief in greater human possibilities of the imagination, the longing for unity, the knowledge that deliberately changing your consciousness (temporarily) (and being out on the edge) can lead to a change for the better in Consciousness – permanently; when done right (only when done right).

In this formulation, for example, and which I can very much attest to personally, the use of marijuana can make you feel two ways.

One: tuned out, drugged out, apathetic, tired and with the munchies.

Two: Awakened, heightened, more alive, more ambitious, more energized, more open, more adventurous, more bold, more spiritually attuned at every level, hungry for more life and not just mere food.

This essay is about pursuing the use of drugs for the second mode.

It should surprise none of us that in America, Land of the Vulgar, the first, bad way of using weed (and other substances) is the one that gets all the press.

After all, we’re also the ones who proudly elect the worst (or best) snake oil salesman in history to be our supreme leader.

But there is, as Carl Jung pointed out, another way, a way Jung secretly called (knowing it would be released later) “sacred pharmacology.”

A way that, despite its sacredness, or because of it, can very much get you in big trouble or even “ruin your career” (which is one massive reason why Jung never released his research on drug use while he lived; he saw what had happened to Freud and cocaine and had the same rational self-protective instincts of a Galileo, or anyone in their right mind).

Part Two.

In another essay, as a sequel to this one, I will list and briefly discuss the first time I ever tried every drug I’ve ever done and where I was when that happened and who I was with (if I was with anyone), starting with coffee and ending with magic mushrooms, sometimes known as psilocybin, which are being widely tested now by Western science for their medicinal properties. (They can also have properties that feel the very opposite of medicinal, depending on your mood, take it from humble yours truly, and still known today among the youth of America as “a bad trip.”) Warning: discussions of hard drugs like crack cocaine, cocaine, LSD and certain opioids (no needles) will be included in this future essay.

Needles will not be included because I’ve never used needles. I’ve never used needles because all my experiments have been deliberate, and even careful, if it’s possible to use something like LSD or crack cocaine in a careful way (and, at least partly, it is possible, say I).

I won’t talk about alcohol in this list, which is the drug I have the most lifelong experience/s with, by far. (This topic is and will be further covered in greater detail in other essays.)

I also won’t talk about (for the most part) prescription drugs like Depakote and other bipolar medications which have been a big part of my life since 2015, since they aren’t generally what are known as “recreational” drugs (although there can be some serious cross-over here with things like Gabapentin and benzodiazepines).

And the term recreational, for me, is a big part of the problem.

When I use drugs, it is never for recreation at all, just as I never take vacations.

Whenever I travel anywhere, even if it’s just down to the corner again, I think of it as a small journey that’s part of the long journey of life itself – not a vacation.

I’m 58 now (born in 1967, three months before the Summer of Love).

I’ve done so many drugs in my life that I’m sure I’ll be forgetting a few of them, despite the list I’ve made ahead of time by hand before I type it whenever that happens.

This essay doesn’t talk much about ADDICTION, either, which is a separate topic, and one of the possibilities when you play with fire.

But, again, it’s possible to play with fire in a careful way and it’s possible to play with fire in a reckless way that isn’t careful at all.

There is nothing in this world that isn’t dangerous, even traveling down to the corner, even taking a shower, even boiling water for tea (or especially all of the above).

You avoid the danger as much as you can but NEVER to the point where your life is paralyzed (or even well-nigh nonexistent) with fear.

Because we are given life by the Universe (for me it’s God) in order to live life and not living life (in a genuine and authentic way where you actually try, or Don’t Try, as Bukowski said, which amounts to the same thing) is the greatest sin of all.

Sometimes quality is more important than quantity, too.

What good is it if you live to be a hundred and ten and were one of the most boring people to ever walk the Planet, even (or especially) to yourself?

If you already have visionary or artistic tendencies (often but not always the same thing), taking drugs sometimes, in the right way, can enhance your visions, especially in the middle of this sickeningly over-civilized, overly-tame, overly-sheltered, overly-comfortable (for far too many of us) world we’ve created.

Drugs actually aren’t The Way but they can be a ticket to the way just like Dr. Hunter S. Thompson claimed they could be.

He was right about Nixon, he was right about the death of the American Dream, and he’s right about this, too.

Enhanced visions lead to spiritual expansions and augmented consciousnesses (plural) within yourself, and greater imagination, memory, and intelligence, too – not just the munchies.

And the dizziness of having your worldview turned upside down in an instant can be liberating, especially when it happens frequently.

The effect/s are cumulative, for the most part; and it’s a process, a road, a path, a way, not a destination: and getting stuck in a rut is to be avoided whenever you can.

Part Three.

I started attending Wheaton Central High School in Wheaton, Illinois, USA, almost exactly five months after John Belushi, the great comedian and actor, died.

It was Belushi’s high school and it sometimes seemed like his name and even his picture were everywhere in the halls.

And we were lost suburban teenagers of the Ronnie Raygun 1980s who looked to Belushi as a hero not because he was funny or because he died of a drug overdose (with needles) at the Christological age of 33, but because he was a rebellious spirit at his core.

As one of the Blues Brothers, at least half the time he wasn’t funny at all (very much on purpose), but he was never not a rebel.

It was as if we were trying to resurrect the rebel spirit of the 1960s without even knowing we were doing so, and experimentation with drugs and alcohol were a huge part of all that.

Living with a purpose (if undefined so far), driving hard until you were out on the edge (and then hopefully reining yourself in), and making an impression on all the conformist dolts crowding our world (no matter their age or status otherwise) were all the name of the game.

It takes a Houdini-like delicacy and balance, the strength and fortitude of Hercules, the wisdom of Athena, the fearlessness of Achilles and the alertness of Odysseus.

And we learned that if you try hard enough without trying you can turn yourself into none other than a Chosen One.

(We continue with repeats of material first published by Dr. Williams Barrigar Williams on Literally Stories UK. I told my Co-Editor that he really should do a Book of Boo, who knows where a camera is better than Madonna. Both excellent images provided by DWB–LA)

by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

Imagine spending three or four years creating dozens of short stories by hand. No computers, so you do everything with your other tools: pencils, pens, piles of paper: and the typewriter.

For rough drafts, you mostly use pencils. When the pencil gets worn down, you have to sharpen it.

When you write through them all and your entire supply gets worn down, you need to sharpen them all.

Usually you spend your time standing up as you’re writing, although sometimes you write while lying in bed.

And the paper piles up: letter after letter, word after word, phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph: story after story, as you make them, all by hand.

You get blisters on your fingers and your wrist aches from the effort.

You write for years, and you create much juvenile work, work you know is juvenilia, giving you that truly uneasy, hard-to-appease feeling.

But you also feel yourself getting better. And you begin to create a few things that almost look like masterpieces eventually, and then suddenly. At least when compared to the rest of your work.

Then your wife loses everything on a train. For some reason, you kept it all in the same suitcase, plus the typed copies, and entrusted it to her. Someone stole the suitcase. Or, your wife just lost it.

Your new best friend tells you not to worry. You can now rewrite only the best stories, AND: only the ones you remember. The tragedy with the suitcase was not a tragedy at all. It was a blessing. Whatever you don’t remember was not WORTH remembering, your friend tells you. Whatever you do remember will be written much better the second time around.

The writer was Ernest, the wife was Hadley, and the friend was Ezra Pound.

Ernest Hemingway’s first book, “Three Stories & Ten Poems,” was published in Paris in 1923 in an edition of 300 copies, and was the result of the true story above. While much of the work in this book is still considered juvenilia, this is advanced juvenilia of a very interesting kind.

The poems are mostly not worth much these days. Two of them can be said to be much better than that. But the stories, while perhaps not as advanced as much of his later work, are three of Hemingway’s most memorable pieces. Because he wrote them when he was so young (early twenties, in the early 1920s), and because he later became Ernest Hemingway.

“Up in Michigan,” the first story, upends many cliches about Hemingway, because it’s told, very sympathetically, and believably, from a woman’s point of view. It’s a story of young love gone horribly wrong, as young love will do. It describes an awkward, perhaps brutal, sexual encounter between two people. At times, the prose is almost as good as Joyce in “Dubliners.”

“Out of Season,” the next piece, is a husband-and-wife story which began Hemingway’s famous “iceberg technique,” when he deliberately truncated the end, thereby making the whole much more ambiguous and believable. In this piece, you can truly feel the future Nobel Prize winner beginning to come into his own as he reinvents the beginnings and endings of stories.

The third story, “My Old Man,” is a very curious case. While this piece is clearly juvenilia in most of its aspects, it’s also good enough, and well-developed enough, to have inspired two films so far, one a full-length feature from Hollywood, and one a tv movie starring the great and under-appreciated Warren Oates.

The two poems that are worth reading these days are “Along with Youth” and “Roosevelt.” The first poem, set in northern Michigan, captures the passing of youth in a wistful, sad and true manner. The next piece is about Teddy Roosevelt, the great adventurer, who much influenced the young Hemingway.

Its ending is prophetic: “And all the legends that he started in his life / Live on and prosper, / Unhampered now by his existence.”

Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway once shared a bout of angry fisticuffs on the docks of nighttime Key West, Florida. Hemingway, twenty years younger, knocked the large and formidable Stevens down. Both were wildly drunk. Stevens later admitted that he started the fight, and Hemingway finished it.

And Stevens, one of America’s greatest poets, a true heir of both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, also later proclaimed Hemingway one of America’s greatest poets in prose. Stevens had (drunk) wanted to fight Hemingway because of how good he was. (William Carlos Williams delivered Hemingway’s first baby and claimed the big tough guy went weak in the knees as he rushed from the room.)

Hemingway kept William Shakespeare’s complete works and the King James Bible on his nightstand. He called A Farewell to Arms “my Romeo and Juliet,” and the language in The Old Man and the Sea is biblical. When we look through “Three Stories & Ten Poems,” we can enjoy seeing a young writer begin to create a style that influenced everyone afterward, as American literary critic Harold Bloom and many others have pointed out, even if they’ve never read Hemingway. Hemingway took the stripped-back, colloquial American writing style and retooled it for the twentieth century and beyond in a manner that was infused with both The Bible and Good Will.

The clean line, the spoken word, the obsession with brevity and the vivid, telling detail had been there before in American writing, but Ernie was the one who captured the modernist moment and made it universal by adding the heavyweights into the mix.

In France, Albert Camus’ The Stranger had been influenced by James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and other hardboiled American crime novels – which in turn had been influenced by Hemingway.

(Co-Ed note. Both images provided by DWB –Oh, to have Boo’s energy! Today we revisit Dale’s piece about America’s Shakespeare, the great Mr. Clemens/Twain, which was first published by Literally Stories UK. Sam had the same level of education as the Bard, but he’s is not detracted by his own legion of fatuous Baconites.–LA)

“Twain is America’s Shakespeare.”

– Leila Allison (2nd Co-Ed note–see, what did I just tell you!)

From the ages of twelve until sixteen, I was raised on the banks of the Mississippi River.

I first got truly intoxicated via alcohol on the banks of the river. (Alcohol would later become a major passion, until I had to give it up.)

I first tasted cigarettes on the banks of the river. (Same.)

I first tasted the sacred ganja (weed), too, on the banks of the Mississippi River. (Also a major passion, not given up so far as of this writing, except in the smoking form; medical edibles are stronger and more long-lasting anyway…)

I first held the hand of a girl on the banks of the river.

I knew a boy who was raped, robbed, and murdered by two other boys, who I also knew, brothers, who people called “white trash,” his body dumped into the river.

I was first shot at on the banks of the river (the one and only time so far, although a few people have threatened to do so since then, both those with guns and those without, women and men) which is a long and involved story all unto itself.

We lived a couple of miles inland. My friends and I would go down to the river whenever we could, which was frequently. Exactly like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (which I didn’t know at the time), my friends and I would sneak out of our parents’ houses at night, sometimes out of the window exactly like Huck, to go roaming around our small-town world under cover of dark, in the night, the fabulous night, when the ghosts, the angels, the wild animals, and the beautiful mermaids swimming in the foamy river waves come out, or you wonder if you’ve seen them at least.

We sometimes passed the Lincoln-Douglas Debate statue on our way down to the miles-wide river. One time, some friends of mine climbed all over the statue, which I didn’t do, not because I wasn’t a climber, I was a climber, of trees, cliffs, bridges, public buildings, water towers, fences, and sometimes up and down the outside walls of my parents’ house when getting in and out of the window at night without them knowing.

I didn’t climb on the Lincoln statue because I respected Honest Abe, and what he stood for, too much. I’d first learned about him back in Michigan from Mrs. and Mr. Murphy, our next-door neighbors, who had three framed photos alongside one another on their mantle above the fireplace in the early 1970s: Lincoln, John. F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

When we moved to Illinois, I was instantly aware that we were entering the Land of Lincoln because of them. His leftover presence or memory bathed the whole land for me in a sort of immortal or legendary aura, or glow. He was the reason I would join the Blue Devil high school wrestling team here in Illinois, because I knew Old Honest Abe himself had been a wrestler, an individual who took on the bad guys even then (in my mind they were the bad guys).

One of my earliest memories is of crossing the river, in a car, on a bridge. We still lived in Michigan then and were on a family trip to the West. Dad was driving, and mom was pointing out the window, explaining why the river was so legendary.

The deep country in that part of Illinois surrounding America’s largest river is a mythological land that is yet or again unknown to many, but one day may become much more central to America again (despite its being in the center), because of all the fresh water it contains.

Hilly, extremely rural, filled with cliffs, ridges, forests, prairies, cornfields, eagles, deer, wild cats, wild dogs, and hogs, a place where you can easily get lost for hours on the back roads and not see another single human soul, a land of tiny, sleepy villages at crossroads with one person sitting in a chair on a porch maybe, mysterious isolated farm houses and barns back by themselves in the hollows, and small family cemeteries on hilltops like something out of “Wuthering Heights,” an area where the people almost seem to speak with a deep southern accent, a remote, vast region bordering the unconquerable river that few tourists or outsiders ever venture to or stop at, but where you can sometimes see travelers like hobos wandering up and down the lanes or waiting with their bottles and bags to jump a train, this part of Illinois still has an aura about it that conjures up an American past straight out of a Mark Twain story, large-haired, large-eye-browed, large-mustachioed, cigar-chomping, corncob-pipe-holding, whiskey-swilling, covered-in-newspaper-ink, laughing uproariously, raging Mark Twain.

While we visited Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s home town, many times, like everyone else in the area, I never read Mark Twain’s stories, essays or novels when we lived along the river. In a fit of homesickness not long after we moved to Chicago when I was sixteen, I picked up “Huckleberry Finn” on a lonely summer afternoon and was suddenly transported back to the river country, where my best friend had been black, just like Huck and Jim. Their escape down the river forever after would stand for the longing for, and movement toward, freedom in my mind.

William Dean Howells called Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Twain, “the Lincoln of our literature.” Lincoln, Twain and THE LAND equaled THE RIVER in my mind, the strong brown god, as T.S. Eliot from Saint Louis, Missouri, called it, and the river itself equaled freedom, the cardinal virtue in the U.S. of A.’s finest idealist notions of itself. ILLINOIS, the middle of the country and the middle of nowhere, is America itself, boiled down.

As another great and legendary, iconic Middle American, Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, has it about his youth in Minnesota: “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.”

“FREEDOM!” as Mel Gibson’s version of William Wallace, eternal Scottish rebel, a hero to both Twain and Lincoln, hollers out with his last echoing breath at the end of “Braveheart,” a great and overblown film, defying both the king and the mob, and even something else, like death itself.

Americans are good at escaping, or they used to be, just like me and my friends used to escape the comfort of our homes to go roaming where the edge of the world could be found. As Huck says at the end of his book, which he wrote himself, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest…” Now we inhabit the territory of The Mind, and lighting out means keeping your brain (and spirit) as free as possible from the disease of modern life, even (or especially) when they’re coming to get you.

Twain himself had become a kind of early conscientious objector, when he defected from the Confederate army after his very first taste of real violence, which he documents in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed,” and “Roughing It.”

“I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating,” he says about his decision to bow out of the army, avoid the carnage he now knew was coming for sure, and soon, and flee to the West.

“In this country, on Saturday, everyone was struck dumb, and saw at first only deep below deep, as he meditated on the ghastly blow,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination.

The paradoxical actions and reactions regarding freedom of Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, one running for his life, then writing about it, as an example to all of us about how you can escape the system if you try; the other refusing guard and accepting the death he knew was coming for him like it had come for so many (and which comes to all of us late or soon), and which had been shown to him in a dream…are both embodied in trips they took down The River. Lincoln saw slaves on the auction block after a raft trip down The River to New Orleans, and told a friend, “If I ever get a chance to hit slavery, I’ll hit it hard.” Fifty years later, Twain went back into the past and wrote a story about a small “white trash” white boy and a good-hearted, good-looking, and wise, black man becoming the best of friends, all by themselves, at the bottom of society, on a raft trip down The River.

“The brown god / is almost forgotten / by the dwellers in cities,” as T.S. Eliot knew; but “the river is within us…”