Free Radio RuloGod speaks in strange ways through art! Any other substances involved my dude? Sounds like a my kinda novel!
Sloan BashinskyNaw, other than body fluids :-), of which there are plenty in parts of Kundalina and Heavy Wait, but not so much in Return of the Strange, which wriggled up out of me last year, after all the blooms had fallen off the roses, so to speak.
Free Radio RuloWhen the divine works through you ya just gotta let it flow brother! I can't imagine ever writing a novel, that must be an experience!
Sloan BashinskyBased on what I have read of yours, your Muse is working on you pretty darn good, and that’s why I took a shine to you. There might be a novel or two or three in you, and if She shows up in that way, go with her wherever she takes you.
A couple of years before Kundalina, Alabana started showing herself to me, I was invited to be a speaker at a writer’s conference at Birmingham Southern College. I then lived in Colorado, and by then was deep into my writings being steered by something much bigger and smarter than me. Out of the blue, it came to me use “writing as a mystical experience” for my topic, and then I was swamped with looking at Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, the last novel he completed, as his unconscious suicide note. The boy left behind at the dock was young Hemingway whose father had no time for him. The great marlin was Hemingway’s manhood. The sharks were his feminine, come to take back what he had tried so hard to prove to himself, and the the cancer that would eat his brain until he manned up and killed himself.That was my spiel during the first day of the writer’s conference in a small seminar room. There didn’t seem to be much interest. The 2nd day, I had the entire conference for my audience, and I tried again, and there didn’t seem to be much interest in writers writing about themselves unawares, and I was feeling stuck, when someone asked me what I did about writers block, and I said I didn’t get it. When there was something to write, I had to write it. When nothing was coming, I did something else. And that’s when it got interesting.
About a year later, Kundalina started showing up and I typed maybe 100 pages, and then seemed to dry up and I put her aside. I was playing golf at different public golf courses, picking up playing partners at the pro shop. One day, I was put with two men, one lived in Alaska. I asked him if he knew a fellow from Birmingham, who was a college fraternity brother of mine, and then he went to law school, and ended up making a whole lot of money suing auto manufacturers in Alaska, for defective products? The man said he knew the lawyer very well, they were good friends. I said my early childhood next door neighbor sweetheart and the lawyer became an item, and then it didn’t work out and it was rough for them both. The fellow said he had not heard of that and he would be sure to bring it up when he returned to Alaska. I advised be careful, it was a big owee for his friend.
The next morning, I woke up feeling like an idiot. That little girl was the model for the heroine in Kundalina. I went back to work on the manuscript, and after completing a draft, shared it with the desktop publisher lady, who had gotten my book Prisons & Freedom ready for printing. She read the manuscript and said I had done a good job on the hero, Riley Strange, but not on Mary Lou Snow. I needed to bring her to life. So chastised, I brought her to life.
A friend in Birmingham read Kundalina and asked my clinical social worker Sandplay therapist wife where in the hell did Sloan fiend Mary Lou, he was in love with her?! Betty told him, Mary Lou is a part of Sloan.
About a year later, two novels showed up at the same time and I wrote on both of them each morning and finished both on the same day. Br’er Rabbit Meets the Devil and Krazy Justice were wild rides, too. But before they could be published by a vanity press, Betty said she wanted time apart and my world imploded and I left America for a while and those two novels eventually were lost.
How something a lot bigger and smarter than me caused me to write Heavy Wait about as fast as I could type it is explained in the beginning of that strange tale about two very different Rileys and Mary Lous, and a redneck gal named Willa Sue Jenkins. I thought when it was done that there would have to be a sequel, but it didn’t come, and it didn't come, and finally it came last year.
The Muse is different for each writer, poet, novelist, etc. I describe how the Muse is for me.
A little while before the two lost novels were coming up out of me, this came:
He feels deep beauty in the dark pool from which his writings flow, she clings to him like fine silk, precious oil, she feels solid, compressed, like a black pearl growing from inside out, ever larger with each stroke of his pen, pushing her precious waters over her banks into his dreams and life.
Free Radio RuloWild! I would have enjoyed the Hemingway analysis. So some of your characters often turn out to be parts of your subconscious? This all reminds me of James Joyce for some reason. Is he an influence of yours? Who else influences your style?
Sloan BashinskyWhen I read Joyce several lifetimes back, so to speak, he was much too deep for me to grasp. If there is a writer who influenced my writing style, it was Tom Robbins, whose novels Just Another Roadside Attraction, Jitterbug Perfume and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues left me kinda jangled and enamored. But I think it was Hemingway sho perhaps planted a seed in me that caused me to fantasize being a writer someday.
I wonder if my father had it to do over, he would have urged me to take a typing course during my first year in high school? He said he had found being able to touch type was valuable in his business life. Some things I wrote to him and about our family did not please him. But my goodness did being able to touch type make it so much easier to shoot off my mouth on paper and computer screens.
My writing style evolved as time passed. Professional book editors and a creative writing class helped some in the beginning, Then angels helped some. That kind of editing wasn’t much fun for me, but I fortunately was able to accept it as constructive.
That was before the poetry and novels came. They had their own style which I suppose was buried in me, asleep.My writings always were out of the box, disturbing the status quo. The first two poems, which I will fetch, set the tone.
I wrote maybe 50,000 pages of blog posts. Starting 2019, some of the blogs became books, but the novels were stand alones. I did not sit down and dream them up. They dreamed me up. Same with the poetry, and some prose that just up and came out of me."Living Poets”Dead poets are poets who never write
Who obey shoulds and oughts
Who live to please others
Who value money over God
Who die without ever having lived
Death is their mark
Dead poets are remembered by the living.
Living poets are remembered by time
Dead poets never sing their song
Living poets never stop singing it
The difference between the two is this:
One worships fear, the other life
To be a dead poet is hard
It requires being someone else
To be a living poet is easy
It only means being myself
One choice is hell, the other heaven
That is what is meant by free will(1991)"The Mockingbird”I happened upon a mockingbird
singing its fool head off –
I asked it how and why it sang?
But all it did was look ahead,
all it did was sing.
It never turned to see if I was watching,
or listened for money jingling in my pockets,
or asked if I liked its music,
or expected a recording contract –
It was too busy singing
to pay any attention to me.
Thus did I learn
the greatest sin of allis to kill a mockingbird.(1992)If you read the novels Kundalina, Heavy Wait and Return of the Strange, you will see and feel very different writing from what I post at my Substack and blogs. And you might wonder when it’s made up, and when it isn’t. But then, not a few times I have been accused of making up my non-fiction books and blogs, which often are stranger than fiction :-).
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
