there is nothing more disgusting than last night's wine—Lew Welch

I landed in San Francisco in 1968, just in time for the Rolling Renaissance. I had been writing and thinking of myself as a writer since I dropped out of law school in 1965 and got a minimum wage job as a toy packer in a Boston factory. I had a presidential scholarship to Boston College Law, named after Father Robert Drinan who was also a US senator, a very outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. I did not tell anybody I dropped out, wanting to milk my deferment as long as possible. When I did send a note to Drinan, he was outraged, said he was morally obligated to notify the draft board. Within a year I was in Korea—50,000 troops and the only incoming we got was from the whores and each other. I did not think enough of my writing to even send it out till 1969.I wrote prose and poetry, and the poems were closer to the real thing and after I "discovered" little mags I flooded the mail and had some luck. Joel Deutsch, editor of Meatball, published my first collection, and John Bennett's Vagabond Press did three books. Kirk Robertson's Duck Down Press brought out Nonesuch Creek, a selected poems in 1980. My wife and I moved to Tennessee in 1987, and I worked in the artists-in-education programs of several states, including Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Montana, and South Dakota. In 1992 we moved to South Dakota, lived in the Black Hills, and I started writing prose again. I suppose I could make a case for being burnt-out on poetry, all the babbling I'd been doing in the schools. I aimed high when I started sending out stories, even made a few bucks. I sold stories to American Short Fiction, diana Review, High Plains Literary Review, Gallery Magazine, Hustler. It makes a kind of poetic sense to me that I grew up in Delaware, a state below sea level, and I've spent a good part of my life in mountains. The Cumberlands, the Black Hills, the Trinity Alps, and now the Sierra Nevada. I started my second year working in the schools here in Plumas County, last October.

Al Masarik online

IN THE BELLY OF NAKED NAKED NAKED
Thunder Sandwich #24 http://www.thundersandwich.com/ts24/page28.html

HUBBA HUBBA BIG BOY (excerpt)
Slipstream Issue18 http://www.slipstreampress.org/issue18.html