Unearthing a life.....

One of my authorial icons has passed away ... Kurt Vonnegut at the age of eighty-four. In the '50's and early '60's, I was an avid sci-fi fan. In those days it was mainly the written word as opposed to TV or movies. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle was one of my first hardbound sci-fi books purchased. I still remember when Bookworm and I read his Slaughterhouse-Five in '69 or '70.

In the latter '70's, we became friends with his nephew Kit Vonnegut and Kit's wife Bernice. Kit and Bernice worked backstage on the first show that Bookworm directed at the Bremerton Community Theatre ... My Sister Eileen. If memory doesn't fail me (and it well may), daughter Erin also worked on that play and, I think, lived briefly with the Vonneguts before she removed to the Bellingham area.

In the Eastern Washington society that I grew up in, one did not have even once removed relationships with authors. Authors were some elevated and definitely invisible class of people who did not frequent the sagebrush steppes of the Columbia Basin. So it has been one of the surprises of my life to have brushed ever so slightly against against an author or two or three. Some of it Bookworm's doing and some of it not.

There was Frank Herbert, author of Dune, who we had come to the Unitarian Fellowship and address us. After the 'services' he and his kids stayed around and played volleyball with us. One of the kids grew up to author additional books of the Dune Series .... after Frank had unexpectedly passed away.

There were authors at Olympic College events, authors at Centrum, and poets at the dinner table. Not long after Bookworm and I became Margaret Atwood fans, Bookworm studied under her for a week at a Centrum Writer's Conference. Then Bookworm evolved into a yearly featured writing teacher at Centrum .... and Rattlesnake Hills and Jackson Hole and Quartz Mountain. And she began publishing short stories.

All very unexpected and wonderful. Made me feel like I'd moved up a rung or two in the American caste system. Nowadays Bookworm teaches journal writing from time to time here in our home. Where authors-in-the-making .... such as NoApologies and BrownShoes .... sometimes come to practice their craft.

Last and least there are the writing feats of FossilGuy:
In the mid-'60's there were eight-four weekly columns in the Royal City Capsule under the heading Sagebrush Sam Sez.
In 1966 and 1967, I did a number of columns, political cartoons, and a comic strip for The Central Kitsap Reporter (under the editorship of Carol Page).
I wrote a lot of rhyming poetry during those years. When Bookworm came along in 1967 and read it, it made her eyes cross and her throat choke off. Thus ended my rhyming poetry years.
I did later do some fine translations of Federico Garcia Lorca poems (to be found early on in the archives of this blog) .... and several of them were published in a short-lived literary magazine named Quicksilver.
My greatest publishing moment was not even literature. It was my extremely stodgy scientific 'paper' describing a new species of extinct American antelope that I helped dig up in Easyern Washington .... published in 1995 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

And now I write this blog. Speaking for myself, it would have been very crippling to spirit and life to have had to go through it without writing, without reading the writing of others, without marrying a writer, and without all those writers that I brushed ever so slightly against.

God bless the Word that does!

Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut for your part in all these memories.