THE LITERARY LIFE

Me with poets Darrel Gray, Wayne Clifford and Steve Shrader, outside Iowa City, c. 1968. Shot by Jane Nodland for publicity for a poetry reading we would do in Ohio.

Me and novelist J. P. Donleavy. Can you tell I wasn't impressed? Not a nice man. NYC c. 1978

Poet/novelist/etc. Robert Penn Warren, who I did dig, really nice man, and me. NYC c. 1978

Me (third from left) with bosses and cohorts at my only office job (didn't even make it two years) (in publishing) with one of my all-time favorite writers, William Saroyan, second from right. A little too full of himself (as I also have often been), but his writing still reminds me of why he was an inspiration to me as a young writer and man (decades before this shot) who identified so much with his approach and perspective at the time. I still can read and enjoy him anytime (and by the way he was Keroauc's favorite writer when he was a young man as well).

The late great poet/writer/little mag and small press publisher Jim Haining (author of one of my all-time favorite books, A Quincy History, and would be even if I weren't written about in it) and me around 1990 in Portland, Oregon where Jim was living at the time and I was doing readings for I think they call it Artquake.

Writer and raconteur Malachy McCourt, me and writer/scholar Dan Cassidy at a reading Malachy and I did in a San Francisco bar c. 1997.