History of My Reading: To Boulder Go 1969 (Part 1)

Fort Collins, Colorado 1969

In June 1969 Joni and I left Galesburg and headed west.  She had her Knox College degree, though I believe we left before graduation ceremonies. Our immediate destination was Colorado, where Joni would visit with her parents and her older sister, who was also visiting from Connecticut.  I had a bed in the basement of a house in Fort Collins, and then a space on the floor in a Boulder apartment. 

 Partly this was because I was not a popular person with her parents, or at least, they did not approve of their daughter being involved with this feckless hippie with impractical dreams and dubious prospects.  And long hair.

 But I also had a reason to be in Boulder: I had applied and been accepted at a summer writing workshop, officially the annual Writers Conference at the University of Colorado.  For even with the beginning of my disillusion at the Iowa Writers Workshop, I had no other direction or vocation. 

 Even after Iowa, I kept writing and sending things out to magazines, literary and otherwise.  I still have appointment calendars from 1968 and 1969 that record nothing but notes of poems or stories sent out on that date and to which publication, and notes on the dates when they came back with a rejection slip, and notes on the date I sent them somewhere else.

 In those days there was varied advice on how to manage manuscripts.  The accepted rule then was you could submit a poem or story to only one publication at a time.  Some counseled sending a story to “top markets” first, and work down to the little magazines.  Or (with poems in particular) start with publications that favor the style or subject of your work.

 I tried them both.  I wasn’t very skilled at either, and wound up trusting to luck and serendipity, especially when desperate, which was frequently. I was also easily discouraged, so after a few rejections the stories never made it far down the supposed literary food chain. 

 This was when you actually received rejection slips and letters, instead of an unwholesome silence, a judgmental void.  There was a kind of code to rejections as well.  A form rejection slip, usual polite but impersonal, was the bottom rung.  A note or a few handwritten words indicating your work had some merit was better.  A request for more, signed by an actual editor, was near the top.

 The best rejection slips came from a small literary magazine in the Bay Area called Kayak, edited by George Hitchcock.  Hitchcock, Kayak and especially the rejection slips have become legendary. 

The slips themselves used an arcane clip art.  Apparently the art itself made pretty clear when the submission was horrible. (Fortunately I never got one of those, but I’ve seen them now online.)  The others were funny—or as funny as rejection slips could be.  The one I prized did include a handwritten request for more poems, signed by Hitchcock.  (I came across it recently and put it in a safe place.  As soon as I figure out where that is, I'll scan and post it.  This example is off the Internet.)

Kayak published mostly poetry by the likes of Robert Bly and James Wright.  Hitchcock liked the slightly surreal—right up my alley. Though I gave up before getting a poem published there, in the fullness of years I was grateful to be among the near misses. And I was able to return the compliment by favorably reviewing Hitchcock’s collection of his own work in the San Francisco Chronicle, where I mentioned the rejection slips.  His editor let me know that Hitchcock, then in his 90s, had gotten a kick out of it. 

 But during that 1968-69 year I only got a couple of poems published in a really obscure magazine called the Riverside Quarterly, besides a fiction in the first issue of Knox’s new literary magazine Catch.  My first noted literary magazine acceptance was forwarded to Colorado from the Carleton Miscellany, for, prophetically, a kind of book review or appreciation of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  Check included.

 So a writing workshop in Colorado was another opportunity for what’s now called networking, and maybe learning something useful, if not about writing, then about the writing biz.  Besides, going to school was about all I knew how to do.

  There were several name writers who taught separate workshops over two weeks in June.  I was in the class run by Harlan Ellison.  He came from a different tradition than the writers in Iowa City, or the ones we read in literature classes.  He wrote for pulp magazines and now glossy and prestige magazines, primarily science fiction but also horror and erotica, sometimes under pseudonyms, as well as nonfiction of various kinds.  He went to Hollywood and wrote all kinds of movies and television.  He won lots of awards, mostly for genre fiction.  He wrote a lot.  He’d published hundreds of stories by this time, when he was in the early prime of a long career.  His formal education consisted of 18 months of college.

 Ellison was known as a rebel, a gadfly, and an aggressive adherent and promoter of New Wave science fiction, the latest revolution in the field.  He backed up his Civil Rights and anti-war credentials with a hip look and attitude.  He came into the classroom in bright colorful shirts of a unique style—maybe Carnaby Street meets Sunset Strip.  I remember especially the huge floppy collars with a kind of exaggerated Peter Pan collar shape. Or maybe the memory is metaphorical, for that was a major impression I had—that with his boyish face, his enthusiasm and combative energy, and his small stature, he was a kind of a countercultural Peter Pan.  Although at the time I met him he was 38.

 Ellison’s brash energy and entertaining patter in the classroom perhaps obscured as much as expressed his actual intelligence. You can see something of what he was like in his interviews with Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow Show a few years later, some still on YouTube.  (He was one of Snyder’s favorite guests.) 

 At the end of our first class he gave us an assignment to write a few hundred words on the old Reader’s Digest canard: the most unforgettable character we’d ever met.  I wrote about a fictitious person based on someone I’d just met in Fort Collins, although it ended with a surreal fantasy.

  I was still sleeping in the basement of a house in Fort Collins rented by, among others, the boyfriend of Joni’s cousin Mary.  One night Mary took me to a mountain encampment of some of her freaky friends, and I set my story there.  It was centered on another young woman who was there and who Mary had talked about, but it was only vaguely based on her. The 1968 Roman Polanski film of “Rosemary’s Baby” must have been a hot topic (though I’m not sure I’d seen it) because the piece was also a kind of parody of the idea of an unusual birth.  It was called “Geraldine’s Baby.”

 I obviously had been to the University of Colorado Norlin Library by then, or at least walked up to it, because I used the motto engraved in stone above its entrance as a quote before the story: “Who Knows Only His Own Generation Remains Always A Child.”  But I took from it something other than the intended message. In just about everything I wrote, I was trying to express the realities and the points of view of my generation, and why we rejected the past; why we fought so hard to protect our innocence.

 Still, I wanted to live a life as a writer, and so I was of at least two minds—and about three hearts—about the writing biz.  I was repelled by the pretensions and fake preciousness I’d seen in the academy (and feared I saw in the mirror) but I had not given up the large ambitions. Still, I’d grown up on science fiction, and now Vonnegut and the New Wave writers were bringing contemporary ideas and approaches to it.  Besides, what fun it would be to be published in a pulp magazine!  So I was more than willing to listen to Harlan Ellison.

 These workshops were also useful as a way to evaluate where you were in relation to your peers, and to professionals.  I was pleasantly surprised that Ellison singled out my story for praise at the next class. But it also made me greedy.  Ellison had edited the New Wave anthology Dangerous Visions, and he was editing its sequel.  The next day he also praised the story of another participant in our workshop, and word went around that he bought that story for the new anthology.  I was determined to make that sale with my next story.

 At some point I moved to a more convenient distance, to a small but fairly swanky apartment on Cascade Avenue in Boulder, and a sleeping bag spot on a shag carpet in the living room.  My host was a tall man with a big beard and long hair named Bill Stage.  He had known Joni’s Knox friend Kathy, also from Denver, and he grudgingly agreed to let me stay one night.  But when he saw me he had the opposite reaction that Joni’s parents had—which was typical of those days.  Once he saw that I wasn’t a frat boy but another long-hair, he relaxed and told me I could crash there as long as I wanted.

 My longer story for the workshop was titled “Escape From Cloud Village.”  It was about a young woman fresh from college who tries to leave her planned suburb but it won’t let her—lawn sprinklers and hoses, faux antique lampposts, even her own car, conspire against her.  Looking at it now I see wisps of Vonnegut and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone.  But it does anticipate in a way some of the suburban creepiness of my contemporary, Steven Speilberg.  As well as perhaps one way of looking at future events in my own life.

 The story earned me a one-on-one conference with Harlan Ellison.  I got a typed note from him on the same kind of yellow second sheet paper I used: “Bring this in to talk to me.  It is extraordinarily good.  And in some silly ways you can avoid, very bad.  We should rap about this one.  You might be able to sell it.”

 I don’t think my conference was his first of the day, for when I arrived Ellison was restless and a bit distracted.  As I entered the room he put a record on a tiny record player and began dancing with a young woman companion in her flower power mini-dress.  I didn’t know how to react to that, except that I recall I had the feeling that maybe he was trying too hard.

 I remember a sentence he complimented (“do you know how good this is?”), the word he said didn’t mean what I thought it meant (not entirely true, but he was right that it was the wrong word.)  He may have told me that the mother’s speech was too much like a speech—anyway, he should have.  And I waited for more but...that was pretty much it.  I don’t remember a clear direction or advice on publishing it, and above all, no offer to buy it for the second Dangerous Visions anthology. He was ready for another dance.

 So I left, dissatisfied. I didn’t know what to do next. I was pretty much where I’d been before the workshop.  More generally, lost in the big world, I was feeling the pressures of reality, though I fought them off.  Even as I knew my work wasn’t quite there, I didn’t yet have the experience nor the temperament to know how to make it better.  I rejected the uncomprehending, doubting or dismissive voices from outside, but their echoes were inside, and deep.  I mostly had the wild delight of creating, as I fought off the fear of a budding self or soul being obliterated. 

 As for my haughty hopes about the anthology, it would be several years before Again, Dangerous Visions was published. Scanning the contents, I don’t think that story from someone in my workshop is in it—at least I didn’t recognize the name.  I did, however, recognize many names, like Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe and other established science fiction writers.  And a novella called “The Word For The World Is Forest” by Ursula K. LeGuin, which won that year’s Hugo Award and is now one of the immortals, as well as one of my personal classics.  It makes my greed especially laughable. 

 The workshops concluded with an outdoor evening of readings by participants.  It was an open reading, so I signed up to read two poems.  I didn’t get on for awhile, which turned out to be to my benefit. 

 The poems I selected were fairly long, and they were meant to be read aloud—in a way the culmination of my experiments at Knox and Iowa.  One was a sound poem titled “Notable American Fascists.”  Each section ended with a name that was well-known then, though mostly forgotten now, except possibly for J.Edgar Hoover.  The audience loved it, and excited the performer in me.  So I took the microphone off the stand and held it close to make the sounds into it.

 The other was called “Litany”: a form I knew well.  I especially remember the mornings in 6^th and 7^th grade we spent in the dark, cavernous Cathedral, drowsily listening on aching knees to one or another of the Catholic litanies intoned on appropriate days of the liturgical calendar.  I recall writing the first draft of it in Galesburg, possibly alone one night in Robin Metz’s house the previous summer, on folded gray-white paper that had been the wrapping of a book.

 My litany was full of word play and extravagant language, occasionally undercut by a joke (a series of tremulous long lines beginning with the vocative “O,” then undercut by “O Christmas tree.”)  The point of view also resonated with the 1969 audience: “Alkaseltzer of the middle class, you O most mascara-ed of mistreated infants, of wandering and wounded species, instincts gone weird beyond recall”/ O blossom of the tentative, frightened flower!”

 I don't think it holds up now, but it worked for that moment.  It benefited by being preceded by the hushed lines of short poems grounded in moments of personal experiences.  My lines released that quiet audience tension in recognition and laughter. 

 But that was turnabout—for these poems on a page would likely have been met with embarrassed silence in a workshop classroom.  They were meant for this, for performance.  So it surprises me now to realize that this was the first time I read my verses in public away from Knox College.  And it would turn out to also be the last time.

 Towards the end of the evening, Harlan Ellison swept in with his entourage, and read a poem he’d evidently just written about ungrateful students who only wanted a piece of him.  And then he swept out.

 
Another memory of this writers conference is distinct and separate from these other memories. It involves a party.

 There were always parties connected with these events involving writers, and in those days they were drunken parties. This one was at a private residence. I remember two older writers.  One was the novelist Vance Bourjaily, a writer I’d read and respected (and still respect.)

  The other was a man I’d not heard of, and whose name I can no longer remember.  (I should say at this point that in searching for a photo for yet another writer at this conference, I came upon a newspaper story about the conference itself that provided his name, which led me to more information about him. But I’m going to stick to my original plan of keeping him anonymous. However, I thought I remembered his first name—and I did.)

 He was in his late 40s but seemed older to me. I remember him in a dark suit.  He was slightly built, though perhaps a bit paunchy, with a bristly beard. When I first met him, he was an easy, nervy raconteur with a wealth of stories and gossip about other writers, artists and actors—his acquaintances ranged from Robert Frost and Joseph Heller to Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis-- and especially about editors, publishers and Hollywood producers.  He’d lived mostly in New York in the 1950s and early 60s.  I was among a small group listening to him. The theme mostly was how corrupt the whole writing game was.  Good writing wasn’t valued, it wasn’t even wanted. 

He had done a lot of writing for print—mostly magazines but also books, and some work for film and television, often using pseudonyms. He claimed he had ghost-written popular novels, including a giant best-seller by a woman novelist, perhaps Jacqueline Susann. The manuscript was so bad when he got it, he said, it nearly drove him crazy.  It cost him more than he was paid to do it. He was funny, acerbic, and seemed to know a lot.  He was smoking and drinking all the while.  We probably all were.

 After the party I caught a ride back to campus.  I was in the front seat and he was in the back with his current girlfriend. I gathered that he’d been divorced several times. He was still talking.  Now the undercurrent of bitterness in his stories became prominent. He was drunk. We probably all were.

 There was a funny conversation in the front seat, so I wasn’t paying direct attention to him.  But I could hear him getting angrier, less coherent.  His girlfriend was trying to calm him, but then he turned on her. He was nasty to her. That’s what got my attention.  That’s what made me resolve I wasn’t going to end up like him, even if it meant giving up this whole idea of being a writer.  I’m not sure all of this was entirely conscious at the time, but looking back, that’s the substance of that moment.

 It was only after I came upon his name while looking for a photo of someone else at the conference that I learned that he died just a few years after that night.  I don’t condemn his life.  He left children and now grandchildren, he had interesting and accomplished friends, he wrote for high profile publications and was by most measures successful.  But he remained for me a cautionary tale. 

Bourjaily

When we got back to campus, he was not among those of us who joined a few others in the dorm where some of the guest writers were staying. We were in some sort of lounge, and I wound up at the piano, thumping out the blues progressions that were very close to the sum total of my repertoire.  At that point Vance Bourjaily got excited, disappeared for a moment and suddenly returned with a trombone in hand. 

 I’ll never forget the expectant look in his eyes as he anticipated a mellow jazz jam.  He assumed I was an actual pianist. I wish to this day that I had come up with at least a chord progression to carry him.  I think I tried, but others intervened with their musical demands, the scene dissolved into chaos again, and in short order I left.  I was a few days shy of my 23^rd birthday. My sojourn in Boulder and Colorado was just beginning.