In Which the Author Discovers Erin Knight’s The Sweet Fuels

I could spend blissful years stirring academic poetic discourse around a classroom, exchanging highlighted notes and chewing on turns of phrase, but I must keep a promise I once made. I vowed to never frighten a person away from poetry, which has few enough readers, and to let more readers discover its joy. And how could I possibly do so besides sharing my own work with ‘the people?’ Well, I refuse to get caught up in the delicious word-twisting discussions of poetry that render it squashed and meaningless to anyone born after 1857, in the end.

You know what I’m talking about. Pick up an expensive art magazine, for example. You’ll hear it in the way the writers talk about a giant painting of bubbles. “The lines of the painting vivisect at terminal vertical intervals suggesting the death and excavation of history’s muse. To grasp the brushstroke with this painterly torture in mind, one must submerge all faculties in the absence of the artist’s intention.” Then they cheerfully tell you the painting, which to you seems to be a joyous and colourful celebration of gardens or something or other spring, is about the holocaust or Central American hostage holding and it costs four point seven million dollars.

And while I wholeheartedly believe we would all do well to do a few literary gymnastics, to read some old poetry and a few classics, to brush up on what’s currently on the prize lists or new in Canadian verse, it’s best that we recover honest expressions of our impressions. Remember when Kramer embarrasses the whole group by telling the girl with the Cyrano nose that she’s as pretty as any New Yorker? She ‘just needs a nose job,’ he tells her plainly. In the end, who gets the girl?

The tightly knit academic circles will forever bustle in their wordy, toothy circles. Like a bunch of heart surgeons discussing various valve suturing techniques, they will never lend a hand to the lay public to give their passion a wider audience. I vowed to be more like Kramer, to read a book as a smart and lively girl, tell it if it needs a nose job, and praise the beauty it already possesses.

Now, any number of literature professors or old-school editors would ask what the decidedly un-poetic New York television show Seinfeld has to do with Canadian poet Erin Knight’s debut, The Sweet Fuels.

Nothing, if poetry is only a Donne and Milton and Coleridge and never about the sweet plums in the icebox or Bob Dylan or about how even the rain has such small hands.

If you listen carefully to Kramer’s script, he’s a poet in every episode. Like William Carlos Williams, the K-Man waxes especially poetic about fruits. There’s the cantaloupe, there’s the avocado, and there’s the Mackinaw peaches, only available for two weeks of the year.

“The Mackinaw peaches, Jerry… I waited all year for this. Oooh, this is fantastic. Makes your taste buds come alive. It’s like having a circus in your mouth…Jerry, this is a miracle of nature that exists for a brief period. It’s like the Aurora Borealis.”

Don’t always run away from poetry because you don’t know ‘how to read poetry’ or ‘don’t get it.’ Just pick up the peach and savour it.

In Diamond, Knight writes: “Why write only if? Why not write if sunlight/strikes the dust motes in the room, if a splinter/wedges beneath your nail, if you fall/in love, if you fall? Write the nub of graphite/in your palm, pure carbon, memory/of a long-ago word- so many of us have it/lodged beneath the skin…”

Listen:

“Take the small maps on your knees. Grasses
traced routes there as you took back your wind,
while backstory spin in the bicycle tires.
When you stand, can you still read the legend
creased in the skin, is this your quietest scar?”

Listen:

“There’s a gnosis in the undersides of leaves,
silver edges turned up before a storm.”

I have no doubt that Knight’s work will stand up to the scrutiny of the higher hallways. Imagery, metaphor, “continuous engagement with our points of reference.” Check, check, check. But more importantly, this is the kind of book that talks about making tea, about making bread, about leaving the prairies, about searching maps for clues of our past. It is the kind of book that can earn the trust of the pedestrian audience, let us giggle, let us cry, move our ordinary experiences into the divinity of that diamond dust mote.

It can keep a person going through the endless and trivial travails. It is delicious, tender, redolent, and fleeting- like those fabled Mackinaw peaches, sweet fuel.

The Sweet Fuels, by Erin Knight.Goose Lane Editions, 2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, a Handymaiden Edition, 2006. Look for it on Indigo or Amazon. Her poetry has also been published widely in journals like Spillway, Rattle, Modern Poetry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Quarry, White Wall Review, and more.

Please help me by purchasing the books I talk about, my book, or any other books at chapters.indigo.ca

Shameless Self-Promotion: The Astronaut’s Wife by Lorette C. Luzajic

A wise man once said that the only certainties in life were death and taxes. I figured it would be incredibly boring to write a poetry collection about taxes, so I went right for the jugular. I tempered the morbidity with love, that other madness. What kind of poet doesn’t include a few love poems?

This was the official marketing blurb: Love and death have been on this poet’s mind for some time. This poetry maps a few of her most intense experiences, accentuating the positive, the unusual, and the lost. With a unique voice and lively wit, a sardonic twist, strength, and a peculiar resolve through melancholy, these words lay bare her soul. Luzajic believes in exploring the frontiers of the universe, its chaos, its beauty, its small kindnesses, its remarkable spirit. Along the way on these adventures, you sometimes have to say goodbye.

If you are one of those rare gems who constantly reads poetry, you won’t want to miss the “rapier wit” in these poems that ring with “authenticity and truth”. (Hey, I didn’t say it! Those are two of hundreds of positive comments. Not all were positive. Some called my work self-indulgent. But Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, called them “imaginative, witty, and profound.” You decide!) Many of these poems were published in literary magazines like Modern Poetry, Caffeine, White Wall Review, Rattle, Grain, The Fiddlehead and so on. On top of all this, the book looks damn cool, too, thanks to the unbelievable artwork of Iaian Greenson (www.iaiangreenson.com).

If you never read poetry, take a chance on me and treat yourself to The Astronaut’s Wife. Join me in surprising adventures, and meet some characters you won’t forget. But hey, don’t take my word for it: here’s what other people have to say!

I get poetry from readers once in a while, but I never want to read it. Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy. I like them and thank you for sending them. Looking forward to the next book.

Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Soul Mates

“This Girl Can Write indeed! The Astronaut’s Wife – Poems of Eros and Thanatos establishes Lorette Luzajic as a rising, multi-talented poet on the Canadian scene. Her insights into the heights and depths of our common human struggle to live out our own often-buried divinity hold the ring of authenticity and truth. Weep, laugh, enjoy!”

Tom Harpur, bestselling author of The Pagan Christ and Would You Believe?

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

We got the book. Thanks. I don’t know how to properly reciprocate when a writer puts that much of herself on the page. I’m not sure how to honour that. The book treads holy ground, sometimes with a holy rawness and sometimes with unholy eloquence. The last two stanzas enter a whole other realm.

Will Braun, editor, Geez Magazine, Winnipeg

Each time I feel that I’ve found a favourite poem, I turn the page to find myself tempted by another. Valium for Breakfast, A Poem for B and November keep on drawing me back for another read. Wonderful…powerful…thoughts that make me gasp out loud, laugh or blink back tears, all in a few words or stanzas. Thank you for sharing this beautiful gift with me.

Bonnie Staring, editor, www.womencandoanything.com

I am a great fan of your work. My friend used to go on and on about a line from one of your poems “the quiet raging ocean of my messed up heart” before I’d ever read it. He was actually the one that gave me your book. But I found so much beauty in your words, and I felt so inspired no matter how many times I read it. I appreciate so much what you’ve done and the way you felt…The depth in which you write is so amazing, it’s so much more than anything out there.

Through your writing I love the way you live, love the way you love, your heart is so truly unique. Reading your poems brings me the feeling I get on the days that I am in love with the world and I can feel everything.

My best friend in the entire world had the kind of beauty in his heart that I see in your poems, and it brings me back to the feeling that he gave me of someone who was meant for a better world. Unfortunately he died two years ago, and I think about your poems and other sorts of things that he would appreciate as well, and it’s so amazing. I haven’t been able to put it all into words. I would read your poems when I missed him or just felt like crying and it was sort of like a companionship like coffee and nicotine…..I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but I want to thank you for your inspiration.

Stephanie Nord, Georgia, x-ray technician

I n writing this book, the author has, like a rock through a mirror or a beer bottle on the sidewalk shattered her life. You read one of her poems and know exactly what she is writing about. Each is a part of the story of her existence.

She has experienced life like few others would dare. You picture the smells and sounds as well as the sights, but you do this shard by shard. The whole is made up of the shards, yet there is something both more and less to the ‘big picture’.

This is not really a book of poetry; it is more of a memoir. It sometimes uses a poetic form, but mostly not. A few of the poems are a little self-indulgent, but most of them have a brutal, scary honesty. I read this collection two months ago and only now understand what I think of it.

Alexander Burns, criminal lawyer, Burlington, Ontario

The Astronaut’s Wife is a complete lifetime of emotions all splashed helter-skelter across a few dozen pages by a woman who clearly understands them all. This clutch of lyrics seeks out your soul and enriches it with warm, peaceful feelings, and then rips it out with raw, unquenchable anguish. With mythic imagery and erotic undertone, the author carries you on a journey through her own experience of the unending pathos of life and death. Don’t miss it!

Stu Blyde, Threading Machine Set-up/Nipple Manufacturer, Zurich, Ontario

I knew when I was 20 years old that I was the best young writer in Canada, no – pardon me – the world. I felt this in my bones, in my marrow. I had a chip on my shoulder, greasy hair and a brand new Smith Corona on my desk. I even had a working title for the great Canadian novel I was about to write…

Suffice it to say that Lorette’s writing made me feel embarrassed by everything I had ever written. She was Jack Kerouac…I only had the cuffs of my jeans rolled up. Lorette was a blues record that I owned on CD… Novels, short stories, poetry…Lorette was the master of her domain…And I wouldn’t be lying if I told you that she was one of the people who taught me how to write.

Iaian Greenson, writer and artist, Toronto, Ontario

Few of us have had the horrid misfortune of experiencing the death of a multitude of friends, family and acquaintances at a young age. Even fewer have had the blessing and sometimes curse of encountering a lifetime of pivotal events by the time our odometer rolls past 30. Only one person has met and conquered both with the mastery, elegance and savoir-faire of the written word. This person is Lorette C. Luzajic. Lorette is of the most talented, diversified, and multi-faceted writers I have had the pleasure to read. The Astronaut’s Wife is a catharsis for all who have had to endure the loss of someone who has left this world too brave, too loved, and too young. This is a read for people like myself who often find ourselves having to ‘buck up’ when we really should be soaked in tears. It offers a confidant with whom you can find the emotions that need to be expressed, written in words that know you, sit beside you, and hold your hand as you move past pain. However, if you read closely, friends, you will find bits of rapier wit dancing below the surface of even the darkest lines. Also inside are poems that are an old friend reliving memories of times and places that perhaps you have also been to. If not before, Lorette takes you there now. Mainly, this is the kind of writing most aspire to, but never achieve. The Astronaut’s Wife reaches past heart and soul and into the place that you never reveal, sometimes even to yourself. I await Lorette’s next work and the further unveiling of this great talent to the world.

John Bennett, chef and restaurateur,Toronto

The author poignantly claims in one of these collected poems that she “looked straight into darkness to see a starry night.” Indeed, Lorette C. Luzajic has had some highs and lows and she bares them openly in The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Without lowering her gaze, she lets you look straight inside of her and you may flinch before she does.

The Astronaut’s Wife- a poetry book with one of the most amazing cover designs by painter Iaian Greenson – takes its title from a mediocre movie of the same title, but of appropriate melodrama and a good cast. Luzajic borrows to suit her whims frequently, not because she isn’t wholly original – she surely is – but because written, visual, musical and cinematic culture are mainstays of her palette in both her mixed media paintings and in her writing. Guest appearances from all walks of high and low culture may or may not be recognized by her readers, but add layers of depth at every turn. In this case, the title is a perfect fit in keeping with the poet’s grim and steady gaze into the dark skies in search of that Van Gogh-ian glory. Much of her work resonates with this balancing of dark and light, and here the intensity of irony and sorrow shines forth straight from the title. For the book is dedicated to her late husband, who lived the philosophy of psychonautism and then died from it. For the exploration of unknown frontiers can and does lead to death, but still the poet seeks in this collection to know them.

And if the borrowed cover title sums it all fittingly in the poet’s personal folklore, the last poem The Astronaut wraps it all up with a bit of an homage to Dylan Thomas. How dare you go so gently into that good night, she says last of all.

The journey through love and death is harrowing but an amazing resilience shines through creatively as the poet takes you into her psyche. She reveals the kind of betrayals in love that many of us have endured, prying apart their layers with intuition and wisdom. In Prison Blues, she laments the fall-out of a beautiful relationship ruined by control issues. “And yes it’s easy on a Sunday to miss you,” she admits, “the lonely chill of frosty daylight feels sentimental, and does not recall how we wrung each other into total emptiness.” She expresses her fears, wondering if anyone will ever “reach for me the way you reach for me.” Without holding onto anger, she acknowledges the possibility that no one’s “intention is to hurt another – love simply longs to possess another, to keep them with a jailer’s hands.”

Other works show a more cynical and bitter edge toward love and its “quiet scars and gaping maw” (Valium for Breakfast) but the poet still retains in these furious expressions a sardonic sense of humour. “Since you asked,” she writes, “I’ll tell you what has become of me…I’m fat, and work as a cashier, just as Satan promised me on Highway 61.” (That’s a somewhat obscure reference, by the way, to the great Canadian film Highway 61 – there is a scene where Satan tells a poor little girl with big dreams that she isn’t going to be famous, she’s going to be fat and work as a cashier.) But just when it appears that Luzajic might be feeling sorry for herself, (forgivable, I think, for in matters of love we all have those moments) suddenly, she is tough and beautiful and reflective: in Damage she tells us she can’t be sure “he is prepared for the life of a poet, for the rain soaked rooms her soul hides.” And in Untitled for A. she says confidently that she has been many things, from starlet to ghost to artist to lover and that she “was never all those pieces you could not pick off the ground.”

Eros is perhaps a loose interpretation because while many of the poems are erotic or about romantic partners, some of the most powerful are about family, and in fact Luzajic has dedicated the book to her husband, father and brother, the men who have, she says, made her who she is. The most stunning pieces in Love are those that open and close that section. In my brother shows me easter, she turns looking at the moon through her brother’s telescope into a visionary experience we can all share. And the piece that closes the first part of the book is a ten-part poem about family experience, bridging the themes nicely with a last line that refers to love and life as a complicated thing that can easily be simplified – in the end, it is only ashes after all.

It would be unfair to give too much away from the Death section of Luzajic’s poetry. For here, the artist’s soul is tortured by loss, and it is expressed so beautifully that the reader can’t help but cry. The poetry seems to contemplate the dead in all ways with unbelievable eloquence. There’s murder and mayhem and methamphetamine, suicide and AIDS and cancer. Yet something of that starry night shines in each poem, words that comfort and heal even as they mourn. The poems are very personal and yet one gets the feeling that they are written on behalf of everyone, for death is the only truly reliable fact of life.

Melissa Hennessy, writer, Toronto, Ontario

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Helpless by Barbara Gowdy

Kenneth Whyte, an editor of McLean’s Magazine, asked Barbara Gowdy if her new novel, Helpless, implies that it’s normal for grown men to have sexual fantasies about little girls. Gowdy says she thinks it’s more widespread than we know. True, surely every one with this burdensome fantasy has not acted on it, and maybe it’s not something I thought about much before. The thought makes me uncomfortable, as did much of her novel, which is exactly where she wants the reader to be.

Gowdy has created a story of a moral dilemma, a man who ‘loves’ children, a man who wants his feelings for young girls to remain pure and fatherly, but struggles against his dark desires. Like others in love, all sorts of delusions develop within him, surrounding the object of his amour. One delusion is that he is the protector of a 9-year old girl he has kidnapped, and that all other men in her life desire her in the way he denies. He uses these illusions to justify her capture, as well as demonizing her single mother, convincing himself that Rachel is better off in his ‘care.’

Ron struggles with self-loathing, but he is not overly analytical of his motivations. Gowdy has painted him carefully, showing his inability to engage in mature relationships and his awkwardness at mapping the world together, a difficulty in processing his emotions in any meaningful way. His sexuality seems stuck, puerile, immobilized within his own childhood.

Gowdy said she was careful not to make her pedophile a monster- he has not yet engaged in his desires, you see- and in his mind, if not the reader’s mind, the kidnapping itself was more of a rescue mission. Ron, an oafish, chubby, and scrubbed sort of appliance repair person is ordinary and recognizable. Any efforts Gowdy made to have a somewhat sympathetic character actually succeed in making him even more repugnant. The truth is, with so much outrageous, lurid details of killing and torture and child molesting in the papers, it is the quietness and absence of gore that makes Ron even more disquieting. But the success of the story is that Gowdy does not point at every guy- while Ron really could be the man next door, he is not every man next door, and the storytelling reflects this as the plot unfolds. It’s almost as if she’s revealing something: that it could be anyone, but it is not everyone.

And while Ron’s icky yet mild dreams of kissing his captive or his trembling next to her during Everybody Loves Raymond ekes us out, it’s his cruelty and neglect of the grown woman, Nancy, who loves him, that really illustrates the sick immaturity of his sexuality. Nancy, an ex-addict who went and found herself a ‘nice’ man, one who is hardworking and clean from drugs, finds herself in the middle of a hostage situation. A victim herself of the classic granddad maneuver, and a survivor of methamphetamine addiction, she is slow on the uptake to figure out just what is going on at Ron’s place. You want to shake her and send her off to the cop station, but as soon as Nancy knows for sure, she’s on her way there, despite what it may cost her.

Perhaps too much is made of the girl’s astonishing beauty, but creating Rachel’s character in this way, and keeping her in a carefully made room with objects she will like makes Helpless a modern-day Collector story. The parallels between John Fowles’ stunning 1963 novel and Gowdy’s are many- the ‘collector’ of specimens wants to believe he won’t harm her, that she is being treated like a queen, that she is captive but he has no intent to kill her. Both Rachel and Miranda, deprived of outside contact, come to enjoy the company of their captor, and that is all Ron thinks he wants until his desires start to leave his control.

Like The Collector, there is no gratuitous violence and the text, for the most part, is squeaky clean, leaving the barren darkness of the confused human condition exposed without veils on the page. And in case enough ghosts didn’t haunt my ten years of formerly living on Parliament Street, Gowdy uses Toronto’s Cabbagetown District as her stomping ground, detailing quirky neighbourhood characters and venues with a sharp ear and sharper eye.

Helpless
Barbara Gowdy
Harper Collins, 2007

Take a Chance on Me

One reason to read The Girl’s book of poetry is because the cover art by Canadian artist Iaian Greenson is just so cool. The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos explores the chaos, beauty, small kindnesses, and tragedies of her everyday life. Along the way on these adventures, you sometimes have to say goodbye.

“Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy.”
Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul.

You can learn order The Astronaut’s Wife by Lorette C. Luzajic through indigo or amazon online, or see more reviews and order info on her site at thegirlcanwrite.net.

Crad Kilodney for President

The handwritten letter I receive from the legendary curmudgeon Crad Kilodney is bundled carefully with a bunch of logic puzzles and some maps of stocks I might care to invest in. The author of Blood-Sucking Monkeys From North Tonawanda and Simple Stories for Idiots among a whole lot of others, Kilodney is something of a cult figure for Toronto. Up until the mid-nineties, he was a permanent fixture on the streets, rain or shine, hawking his own books. Though he studied astronomy and earned a Bachelor of Science, he wanted to be a writer. So he did what few would-be writers do: he wrote. The man wrote over 30 books, and he hand-sold them personally on the streets. Oh, and once he lived in the same apartment building as Madonna when she was majoring in dance studies at the University of Michigan.

Kilodney’s public mythos is something of a cantankerous, angry, half-starved writer, and the titles of his self-published works only further that reputation. Works like Lightning Struck my Dick, Bang Heads Here, Suffering Bastards, and Terminal Ward make Bukowski and Hemingway look like cheerleaders. Though literati snobs point out that Kilodney published very little outside of his own press, Charnel House, do-it-yourselfers everywhere hail him as Lord of the Underdogs. Kilodney’s dour perspective on the Canadian small press’s waste of paper and supplication of government money is well known. Though he retired in 1995, he occasionally cracks his caustic whip in pieces for his own web site, Dead Man Talking, at www.cradkilodney.net. I asked him if giving up writing has made him less depressed.

“It wasn’t writing that depressed me,” Kilodney says. “It was this city full of awful people. Retiring has definitely improved my emotional state because I don’t have to go out on the street any more and deal with hostility and bullshit.” At least the man isn’t starving anymore. Investing in mining stocks has treated him to some easy money. “Girl, if only you knew…” he says when I ask how much.

.

“I came back to the earth plane to be a writer because I didn’t get to be one in my previous life. If you don’t believe in reincarnation, too bad. I’m going to tell it as I know it, even if I can’t prove it. I lived before, roughly from 1900 to the 1940s. I was a rich idler with vain literary pretensions. I loved books but never had the literary career I wanted. I died rather young, from some sort of accident. When my soul went to the spiritual plane…I was unhappy because I had not done anything in my life to be remembered by. So I asked to come back. The deal was that I would have a literary career that would be unique in human history, but for this privilege, I could expect to pay a high price. All of this has happened. Writing never made my miserable….In public, I’m afraid I am rather cantankerous. I feel that I’m constantly surrounded by idiots and freaks. No, I don’t see a chance at happiness. Not everyone gets to be happy.”

I know that writers are a funny breed- I’m intimately acquainted with the heady delusions that seem to follow us, the disappointment and frustration and the poverty that most writers experience at least for awhile. Perhaps Kilodney’s whole career was a kind of performance art about writers, a parody of the desperate interplay between the publishing industry and the jokers who write for it. He was something of a prankster, after all, pushing buttons no one else was brave enough to. I recall getting flack in university literature for failing to find any grandeur in a few of Irving Layton’s dirty old poems. Guess I wasn’t the only one.

“There were two hoaxes I did…the first one was aimed at the CBC Radio Literary Competition. I sent in stories by seven different famous dead authors, disguised as the work of unknown writers. All seven were screened out by the preliminary readers. The following year I sent a manuscript of poems by Irving Layton- disguised as the work of an ex-Ugandan army officer- to 26 different publishers, including McClelland and Stewart, Layton’s principal publisher. The only two who caught on were two of the smallest literary presses. Editors are stupid. There are no formal qualifications to be an editor. Look at J.K. Rowling’s experiences with Harry Potter. It was rejected by all the big London publishers.”

Kilodney also suffered the indignity of being issued a ticket for vending his own books without a permit. “This led to a protracted legal battle with Metro,” he says. “We were in the court of appeal, and Metro wanted to drop the whole thing and I wouldn’t drop it…I had no fear of those bastards, and I made sure they knew it. In the end, the case was moot because the law was scrapped by someone else’s case.”

Kilodney also “ran” for President of the United States in 2000. “What America needs is a President who is a mean son of a bitch, and I’m it. Therefore, I am asking American voters to write in the name ‘Crad Kilodney’ on their ballots in November.” He cited his perspectives on several pressing issues. “Immigration will be based on physical beauty. What’s the point of letting in a lot of short, brown, ugly people who look like toads when there are millions of hot Russian and East European babes eager to emigrate to the West?” was one example. As a candidate, he also had some stellar ideas on solving homelessness and poverty. Poverty is relative. “If you say the poverty line is $10,000 a year for one person, you have so many poor people. If you lower it to $1,000 a year, you have a lot less. Anyway, the fact that they’re still alive means they’re getting money from somewhere, so forget about it.”

There was also the stint at Rustler magazine, where Crad “would write crackpot letters and sign them with the names of real people.”

The guy will indeed go down in history as a bitter rabble-rouser, and maybe that’s just as it should be. Kilodney seems certain that he came to live his fate, and that that is what he did. I hope his work garners at least some of the attention that his persona has: now here is a man who never ran out of titles or out of wry observations about the weirdoes that surround him. The sheer tenacity to live your fate so fully only to do a 360, disappear from the streets, and show up in a suit and tie in the stock world, is something I can only admire.

I would say Crad’s got the last laugh, but in my final analysis, I ‘m not sure he was really laughing at anyone in particular at all, just doing his thing in the world. So I ask him if he thinks he is a good writer, if he feels he was successful.

“My writing is what is is, and my life is what it is. I came back to be a writer, and I had a literary career. Posterity passes judgement, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Hey, I know who’s getting my vote in the next election!

www.cradkilodney.net

Try www.abebooks.com to source Crad’s books.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
Buy her book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos online at indigo or amazon

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chapters.indigo.ca