Jack Saunders - The Madcap Titan of the Dustbin, The Salvage Archeologist of the Mall Builder Culture, The Swinette-Picker of American Letters, and America's Greatest Living Unpublished Writer, Perhaps the Greatest Unpublished Writer Ever

"Jack Saunders has produced a body of work, his stack, and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting.

He has published fliers, pamphlets, chapbooks, books, and series of related books himself, through independent presses, and on the worldwide web.
He published his first chapbook, Playing Hurt, in 1976, after writing, and working as a laborer, for five years. His first book-length book, Screed, was published five years later, by Vagabond Press.
He first appeared on the worldwide web, at Out Your Backdoor, in 1996. He has had his own web site since 2000. He published 18 books at The Daily Bugle, 22 books at roman-feuilleton.com, and is currently publishing a book a month at The Daily Bulletin. Writing the Great American Novel on the Worldwide Web is part of JACK THE RAVER: THE CREATIVE NONFICTION BYLINED COLUMN NOVEL, his 238th book.
He has not sold a word to New York or Hollywood.
He calls himself, or has been called, The Madcap Titan of the Dustbin, The Salvage Archeologist of the Mall Builder Culture, The Swinette-Picker of American Letters, and America's Greatest Living Unpublished, or Underpublished Writer, Perhaps the Greatest Unpublished, or Underpublished American Writer Ever, which he shortens to "America's greatest writer."

Q: What is daily typewriting?
A: It's a cross between what Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac, "That's not writing, it's typing," and what Milt Jackson said about Dizzy Gillespie, "Every time I hear Diz play, I think: `He was just now developing into what you heard tonight.'"
I am just now developing into what you read right here.
Also, I am writing a long series of connected works like Kerouac's Duluoz Saga, only with the real names left in. None of the trips combined or left out.
Q: Do you write every day?
A: I write every day.
I post what I have written on the worldwide web every day.
I answer reader comment in the next day's work. Sometimes for days after, as I think through what a reader told me.
Writing is a lonely activity.
You talk to your wife, after work, and your kids, on the weekends, and clerks, librarians, postal window-people, during the day, but you don't get a lot of feedback about your work from people who aren't reading your work. When you do, you listen to it.
Q: Who do you hear from?
A: Members of the Buzzard Cult.
Q: Who are the Buzzard Cult?
A: I call my coterie of steadfast readers the Buzzard Cult, after the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after European contact.
The Buzzard Cult was a mortuary complex, formed around interment of the dead.
I say I'm like an explosion in a charnel house.
From the gases from decomposing corpses.
Blaster Al drew a picture.
Q: Wow, that's neat.
A: Yes.
No readers, and you're crazy.
One reader and the two of you are just outnumbered.
A handful of readers, high one-, low two-figures, is a cult following.
Many writers only have a cult following, until they cross over from the underground to the mainstream.
I was a Charles Bukowski fan as soon as I read Post Office and his stories and poems in the NOLA Express.
Q: How long have you had a cult following.
A: I published Playing Hurt and Raw Energy in 1976. Sent them out to fans.
I was doing what I'm doing now, online, through the post, with pamphlets, chapbooks, fliers, and four-page sheets, since them. Since 1976.
I have published 227 pamphlets, chapbooks, fliers, and four-page sheets.
I published a couple of books in pamphlet form.
I xeroxed book-length manuscripts and sent them to people.
It's no insuperable burden to pay the reader to read your work.
Q: Do the Buzzard Cult read you online?
A: Yes, I have readers who read what I post online every day, when they drink their morning coffee.
Q: At home?
A: The ones who work at home. The ones who work, read it at work.
Q: So it's not like you were shouting into the void.
A: Pissing in the wind.
I know they're there, but I don't hear from them.
Who I do hear from is agents and editors.
And from them I get no reply or a form letter rejection slip.
Q: How do you deal with rejection?
A: I ignore it. I complain about it. I let it get me down. I shrug it off, and take care of business.
It's part of the racket. You get used to it.
Work through it."
Q: You have to work to support yourself. How do you combine writing and work?
A: I don't waste time.
I write before and after work.
I don't watch a lot of television.
If you don't watch television, you'd be surprised how much time you have.
Q: Don't you stare out of the window a lot?
A: I'm thinking. That's not wasted time.
I think on my walks, too. I used to walk a lot.
Q: How did you work as a laborer and write both?
A: I wrote in my head at work.
I could keep a day's writing in my head.
I went over it again and again, polishing it, refining it.
My job was mostly repetitive tasks, that didn't call for thinking, or close attention.
When I got home at night I would type up what I had written in my head at work.
It was like taking dictation.
Q: When you got a desk job, and had to write technical manuals, you must have had to think about what you were doing. How best to do it.
A: I was a quick study.
After you've done it once, it's repetitive.
But even the first time, I was an experienced writer. I had written term papers and site reports in college. And I had written nine novels. I was not an inexperienceds writer. I wasn't groping for words. I had a facility for it. A knack.
I could do my assigned work in a fraction of the time my co-workers needed to do the same work.
After I did my assigned work, I did my work.
At work.
Q: Did they know?
A: I was discreet about it. I didn't confront them with it. I snuck. We both looked the other way. Because I did a good job on their work.
I might say I have gotten too old to do that.
I can't motivate myself to do it.
I'm like a donkey. You beat him with a stick he won't get up. He just grits his teeth and takes the beating.. He might bite you if he sees a chance. For beating him.
Q: What is your goal, as a writer?
A: To get at and witness to the truth of who I am through daily typewriting.
Q: What truth is that? Have you got at it?
A: If you keep your eye on the lodestar, and create, you'll get there.
Don't quit, don't make excuses, complain, if you must: longing and regret are a part of the truth.
Q: Just what have you accomplished?
A: I produced a body of work, my stack, invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting, and found a medium to get it out to the reader through, a web site on the worldwide web and self-published pamphlets.
Q: How big is your stack?
A: 337 books. And growing.
Q: That's not chopped liver.
A: No.
I guess my goal now is not to quit, sell out, or turn bitter.
To see it through. Finish the job.
Not disgrace myself.
Not let the flag down.
Q: You're like Henry Darger, churning out your collections of black papers in your lonely room.
A: Yep. One day they'll find me slumped over my computer keyboard, dead.
My head exploded. From the pressure.
Q: What pressure?
A: Life. Work. The usual.
Ordinariness. The bills.
The constant attrition of the wood. That is, the nutmeg.
I fly the black flag of a pirate.
Being a pirate isn't easy. It takes its toll.
Q: Does your work have a theme, that runs throughout?
A: Vocation and career in conflict.
One time I took a writing seminar and they asked us to state our theme in five words or less and that's what I wrote down.
How do you get at, and witness to, the truth in a world that doesn't want it. That is hostile or indifferent to it.
How do you keep body and soul together when you keep getting your dick knocked in the dirt.
Q: How do you?
A: You get back up.
You grin your death's-head grin at them.
Q: What other writers influenced you?
A: Charles Bukowski and Charles Willeford.
Both worked in a variety of forms, both were fairly old, before success came, both were looked down on by the establishment. They were outsiders.
Bukowski was a Skid Row bum and Willeford was a retired master sergeant. A career enlisted man.
They both had a worldly sense of humor, they had been around, they didn't take it serious. They saw how things worked. From the bottom up.
They had swum in the shit.
Q: Let me throw some names at you.
A: Go ahead.
Q: Hunter S. Thompson.
A: I liked Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972, and "A Dog Took My Place," his account of the Pulitzer divorce trial.
The rest, he pissed it away, getting high and drinking. Cutting didoes.
Too bad he didn't get sober. He might have been something besides a magazine writer.
As it was, he was a hell of a magazine writer.
Q: Norman Mailer.
A: Alimony slave.
Wrote Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Guesswork and Bluster.
Marilyn and Marilyn: The Sequel.
Joe DiMaggio should have hunted him down and beat the shit out of him.
Q: He was a prizefighter.
A: Are you kidding. Mary McCarthy could have beat him up. I'm surprised Adelle didn't.
Q: Did any of his work influence you?
A: Yes. Advertisements for Myself.
Q: What about Hemingway?
A: He combined fiction and autobiography in interesting ways.
Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, A Moveable Feast. The Gulf Stream fishing letters in Esquire.
He was a rummy. John Barleycorn got him.
Also, Life magazine got him. Being a movie star got him.
Q: Are your goals impractical?
A: I'm doing it.
They are immodest. That's why it's taking so long.
But they haven't stopped me.
Slap Out, Alabama (YU)--Writing in the Bukowski number of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Gerald Locklin says that, by publishing in fugitive little magazines and alternative, "underground" newspapers, Charles Bukowski enjoyed "the most freedom of any published writer in American literary history."
By going unpublished, underpublished, and self-published in beneath-the-underground web sites like The Daily Bulletin, Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut, Miami Bureau Chief, YU News Service, a parody news and disinformation syndicate, had more freedom than Bukowski.
That's an immodest goal.
But a practical way to go about reaching it.
I have more freedom than Bukowski.
And I got it by going unpublished, underpublished, and self-published.
Q: What advice would you give to younger writers, starting out?
A: William S. Burroughs told Jesse Bernstein, "Keep it in the family. Stick with your friends."
Don't outgrow your raisin'.
Your friends will tell you if you're fucking up.
They will cheer you up, when you are down. They're in the same boat.
Q: Is that what you get back from the Buzzard Cult?
A: Yes.
Honesty.
A sympathetic ear.
Understanding.
Q: Don't you know it's career suicide to call yourself a redneck?
A: Redneck gotta eat too.
Of course I know. I have been through Civil Rights, Women's Lib, Gay Pride, and the DC-10.
If you think I should have white guilt, over having white privilege, look around. You're up there and I'm down here.
You're doing better than I am whoever you are.
Q: You're doing okay.
A: Good enough.
For who it's for.


Jack Saunders' Stack. The titles, in alphabetical order:

1. 1984

2. A1A Stories

3. A Borrowed Bicycle Down Timeless Roads

4. A Couple of Heatherns

5. A Different Drummer

6. A Legend of the Underground

7. A Likely Lad

8. A Long Season

9. A Lot of Hash Marks for Very Few Stripes

10. A Modest Proposal

11. A New Leaf

12. A Poor Man's Like a Gopher in a Tub

13. A Postcard From Seaside: My Trip Around Florida's Emerald, and Florida's Forgotten Coasts

14. A Stationary Feast: Charles Willeford and the American Dream

15. A Straight White Male, From the South, of a Certain Age

16. A Summing Up: What I've Done So Far, and the Conditions I Did It Under

17. A Tale of Two Cities

18. A WPA Guide to Point and Shoot, Florida

19. Additional Material

20. Adventures in the Meat World

21. Adventures in the Underground

22. Airing Dirty Linen

23. Airman

24. America's Greatest Writer

25. An Even Hundred Books, Since Forty

26. An Even 300 Books, Since Forty

27. Anthropologist-in-Residence (AIR)

28. Apprentice

29. Art Brew: Recent Works on the Worldwide Web

30. Art Brew's Daily: News That Stays News

31. Art Brew's Secret Life: From Pamphlets to the Internet

32. As I Please

33. At-Large

34. At-Risk

35. At the House: A Campaign Journal

36. August 2008

37. Autobiographical Fiction, or the Fictional Autobiography: I Just Call It a Künstlerroman

38. Bad Habits

39. Badge of Honor: The Stigma of Self-Publication

40. Balder

41. Beat Poet

42. Best of Luck Placing It Elsewhere: A Life Outside of Letters

43. Bicycle Horn

44. Bill's Birthday

45. Billy Buck

46. Black Drink

47. Black Harvest

48. Black Harvest (Cont'd)

49. Blast

50. Blessed Is the Man Who's Found His Work

51. Blivet

52. Book

53. Botched Book: Damned by Dollars. Three Weeks in the Life of an Underground Writer

54. Botched Book: The Moby-Dick of How-To Underground-Writer Guides

55. Breakthrough

56. Brenda's Birthday

57. Brenda's Old Home Place

58. Broke-Dick Dog

59. Buck Sergeant

60. Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family

61. Bushed

62. Casebook on Crank-Lettres Confidential: The Art Brew School of Daily Typewriting Writing

63. Christmas Stories

64. Christmas Stories

65. Compositions

66. Coming Up for Air

67. Congeries: A Heap, or Pile

68. Conversations with Myself and Others

69. Cookin'

70. Cracker

71. Cracker Power

72. Cult Writer

73. Cult Writer

74. Cunning

75. Cursed By Fate

76. Cussedness and Gumption

77. Custodian

78. Daily Typewriting

79. Daily Typewriting (cont'd)

80. Daily Typewriting: An Online Journal (OLJ)

81. Daily Typewriting Forever: Something New Under the Sun

82. Daily Typewriting: The Mechanics of the Craft

83. Dancing About the Rim of the Crater

84. Daybook: Poems, Stories, Letters, Interviews, Journal Entries

85. Dean

86. Debacle

87. Declaring Victory: The Underground Writer (Art Brew) Who Changed the Art of Novel-Writing, Posting His Daily Typewriting Online, Daily, for Years

88. Diamond in the Rough

89. Diary of an Angry Would-Be Writer

90. Dieseling

91. Die Trying: A Dread Clampett Novel, with Additional Features at the End and Wrestles All Comers: The Dread Clampett Tour and Under Construction

92. Dirt Archeologist

93. Dirt Archeology

94. Dis Here: Hope and Horrible Wasted Foolishness, Locked in Carnal Embrace

95. Distance Learning

96. Disturber of the Peat Moss

97. Don't Drink and or Drive

98. Doolalli Tap

99. Double-Ought

100. Dragging Up: Art Brew Gives Himself an LDA Grant (Last Ditch Attempt)

101. Dread Clampett

102. Drunk as a Bicycle

103. E Pluribus Unum

104. Eat My Dust

105. Education

106. Eighty-Sixed

107. Employment History

108. Enough About Me--How Did You Like My Book: 139 Testimonials in Honor of Jack Saunders on His 35th Anniversary as a Writer

109. Evil Genius

110. Exile

111. Fear of the Sack

112. Feast of Flowers

113. Festival

114. Fighting Roosters: A Hard-Boiled Appreciation of Charles Willeford

115. Final Cut

116. Fired for Blogging; Book Rejected: Writing the Black Novel After 9-11

117. Fishing Stories, or, Beer-Can Island

118. Florida Boy

119. Florida Writer

120. Florida Writer: A Life Under Erasure (Sous Rature)

121. Flush

122. Folk Master

123. Fool's Paradise

124. Fortune's Favorite Child

125. Forty

126. Four Views of Mt. Fuji

127. Free Jazz

128. Friends

129. Frog

130. Garlic Power

131. GI

132. Global Village Village Idiot

133. Gob of Spit

134. Goldbrick

135. Grand Retrieval

136. Greatest Hits Boxed Set: A Pretty Fair Country Writer in a Subgenre Filled with Second-Raters

137. Griping, Testimony, or Confessions

138. Gulf Coast Blues

139. Gulf Coast Blues: A Month in the Life of Florida Chronicler Contender Razz Heap, The Happiest Man Alive

140. Guy Lit

141. Hack Writer

142. Halloween

143. Heap

144. Hiatus

145. Highway 30A Stories

146. Home Movies

147. Homecoming

148. Homestead

149. Honors and Awards

150. Hospitality Industry Report Writer and Folk Art Critic

151. Househusband, or, The King of Daily Typewriting

152. I Accuse

153. I Drive to Fairhope, Alabama

154. I Drive to Ojus

155. I, Motingator

156. I Regret Nothing: An Underground-Writer Procedural Novel

157. I Remember

158. I Remember Yeats

159. Immobilized in Parker: The Retirement Year

160. Immobilized in Point and Shoot: A Comic Novel

161. If We Make It Through December: Vignettes and Feuilletons

162. In Glorious Black and White

163. In My Room: Immobilized in Point and Shoot

164. In the Maelstrom

165. In the Wind

166. In Real Time: Writing, Publishing, and Selling Books Along the Redneck Riviera

167. Information Specialist

168. Inside Underground Writing: Two Zine Fests, a Hootenanny, and a Side-Trip to Paradise Garden, with a Death in the Family, in Between

169. Jack the Raver: Heap Drags Up

170. Jack the Raver: The Creative Nonfiction Bylined Column Novel

171. January

172. Journal of a Memoir

173. Journeyman

174. Joy Spring

175. Jubilee

176. Jupiter

177. Keep Up the Good Work

178. Keratodontalism Forever!

179. Laborer

180. Laborer

181. Large Pyle's Last Writers Conference

182. Leprous Hotdog

183. Log of a Big Hat

184. Loony Tunes



Saunders archive