Back to Jack, A Poem, Drawing Challenge Blog

We're so busy around these parts lately, I've hardly been able to make time for this enterprise. Our annual Jack Kerouac memorial reading is coming up, on October 21, so we're full steam ahead on rehearsals, locking down the script, getting a venue lined up, and chasing down performers. Back to Jack is a literary tradition in Toledo, going back to 1984. The original 'Jacks', five poets and musicians who performed and caroused together, took Back to Jack to Lowell, MA, and Ontario, I believe, and even performed in front of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady's widow. They also performed all over town, in bars, sandwich shops, and the Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Toledo.

Fairy Tales, Wandering in the Woods, Writing a Novel

I've been thinking a lot about fairy tales lately, mostly because I'm trying to write one, a fairy tale, something modern and ancient at the same time, inspired by Robert Graves and Neil Gaiman, John Crowley and C.J. Cherryh. There are rules, you know. Games and Riddles, balances struck, a tally of your misdeeds, a record of your mortal ignorance. An example of mortal ignorance: there are a million ways to write the word 'fairy', and all of them mean the realm of Fairy, and the individual creatures which are known as fairies, who live in the realm of Fairy. Oy. And in the first draft writing of this blog I've used many versions of the word. Which, you know, may be the right way to do it, since the realm and its citizens have been described as eternally changing and nearly impossible to catalog and comprehend. I'll do my best here to maintain the use of one version, the one spelled like this: F A I R Y.