As the Red Barn delves into my earliest journals, I’ve mentioned that we’re skipping over many of the entries that have already been distilled into my previously published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose. I do hope you find what’s turning up to be brilliant and, uh, let’s back up, somehow engaging. It was a unique time and journey.
Still, I’m coming across material that seems more suitable for a different typographic and visual presentation apart from a straight Red Barn post, and that’s led me to create a Chronicles category at my Thistle Finch editions free digital editions “bookstore.” Offerings at that site allow me more flexibility in formatting, especially for you to download or print. Quite simply, it often feels more “literary,” with its own satisfactions.
Initial posts there as an outcome of my journals review are now available as free PDF downloads. Among them are New Novelists Back Then, notes from a lively contemporary fiction course, meaning cutting-edge novelists back in the ‘60s; Hitching, drawing on thumbing-on-the-road encounters in the hippie era; and The Past Still Speaks, three literary quotes that still resonate.
Another presentation there is a photo album, Mulberry Row, with images of a dormitory quad that prompted much of the action in my novel Daffodil Uprising. Collecting those images, which become this “lookbook” or “storyboard” was helpful in re-envisioning the narrative. Perhaps it will help readers, too, in internalizing the scene.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
Jnana's Red Barn 