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| "YOUR RIG OR MINE?" |
| As you can see from the last of chapter of Volume One, I was really warming up in anticipation of telling this love story--such a refreshing change from the usual drab homeless stuff! I did start writing down the chronicle of how our love grew in that industrial setting. This included an account of a trip we took to California for a family re-union in which we met my seven-week-old grandniece (pictured above.) But as it turned out, this was not to be a published story. As I explained in this letter to Jeff Zenick that was in the July 1999 White Buffalo Gazette: "...The latest project I've been working on was the love story about me and John. I started writing it in a novelistic format, thinking I'd send it out one chapter at a time to be published as a serial. I was very hot working on it for the past week or so, writing at least one chapter every day and feeling good to be back in the novel-writing mode. "John had seemed agreeable to it, but when we talked about it again last night he vetoed the idea of sending it out for publication. He said it might be ok if I changed his name and disguised it as fiction, but this factual blow-by-blow reporting on our private love life wouldn't cut it for him. I keep forgetting that most people aren't like me; I'm one of those oddballs who have a need to make their private lives public--or at least a lot of aspects of it that most people wouldn't dream of revealing to strangers. Private is private after all. So now I have to re-think that idea and figure out something else. Too bad--it's such a beautiful story, and truth is so much better than fiction!" What I ended up doing was extracting passages from that epic that were about our struggle for survival as homeless campers, the plight we shared in common with all the others in that industrial zone. I only talked about our relationship in the general outlines. This story I did send out one chapter at a time and called "NIMBY'ism in Eugene." This one turned out to be quite popular; it was published as a running serial in Spare Change, the Homeless Grapevine and the White Buffalo Gazette over the course of the next year. (click here for next page) |
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