When I began, I planned to do three things in
spinning
my web on this my Web Site.
The first was
structural (did structure my life for two years) and central,
to self-serialize my 24-chapter novel,
The Bridge
of Dreams, a chapter
a month for the first two years of the 21st century.
I began doing that in January of 2000 with:
and finished in December of 2001, with Bridge
24, having crossed
The Bridge of Dreams (for intervening
chapters,
go through Contents
).
As a continuation of that project, I spent the next
two
years on a four-play dramatic
adaptation of that novel, each a three-act play, based
on Jack's four women:
Betty, Laura, the Countess, and Christine.
I began, in February, 2002, with Betty
I: Pygmalion. In December, 2003,
I added the last act of the last set,
Christine
III: The Bridge of Dreams.
(for links to the others, see Plays).
After publishing the poems of a collection of poetry
I
self-published in 2000,
Going Formal, online
in 2004, I spent 2005 self-serializing a revision of
the 12 chapters of my second novel, The
Sequel (to The Bridge of Dreams),
which I wrote on the challenge of writing a 50,000 word
novel in the month
of November, 2004, posed by NaNoWriMo (National Novel
Writing Month).
I began, in January, with Sequel
1: Romeo and Juliet and, for
December, added the last chapter, Sequel
12: Thomas and Phèdre.
For 2006 I was doing a second revision of that
novel,
a chapter a month,
and fixing the text, after a fashion, by running copies
at Pro-Print each month.
(I stopped as I wrote my third novel, A Tale of
Two Dairies, a coming-of-age
novel for Young Adult readers, in the last half of
2006,
revising it in the
first half of 2007. Having finished that, I
planned
to return to revising
The Sequel--the last half of 2007.
I keep promising--
but have fallen behind).
The second thing
I decided to do was affirm my Kansas roots by introducing
other Kansas writers, one a month, most of them friends,
most of them published by The
Woodley Press--and all with books in print.
 
I began that in February of 2000
by introducing the friend for whom the
Press is named,
Bob Woodley
(added Chapter 5, "The Hunt," from his unpublished
novel,
Cry
to Dream Again,
in September) and our most Kansas writer (in my
judgment),
David
Tangeman.
For authors added from March, 2000, to September,
2009,
see Kansas Authors.
Errol Wayne Anderson
My
Kansas author for this month of September, 2009, is Errol Wayne
Anderson,
and the book
is The
Job Coach.
Errol
Wayne
Anderson
The Job Coach
I
didn't know Errol
until recently. As his biography in the back of the book tells
us, he grew up in Kansas,
but then worked most of his
life in the graphic arts
industry, starting out operating printing
presses and ending up experienced in hands-on printing and the
supervising of printing--a master printer. He pursued
his interest in writing while still printing, until, in 1999 he decided
to take an early retirement, moving back to
the Flint Hills, in good part to have more time to write. He
thought he really wanted to retire, but, like so many of us, within a
few months started looking for a part time job to occupy his
time. He saw an ad in the newspaper from one of the local school
districts, and applied for a job as a "Para." As he describes
it:
You've
heard of
Para-Medics and Para-Legals? Well, there are also Para-Educators.
When they saw I had a good deal of experience in supervision and
training, they asked if I would like to be a job coach in Special
Ed.
My first question was, "What's a job coach?" What an experience! The
next seven years were some of the grandest years of my working career
as I worked with my Special Ed. Students.
It
wasn’t long
before I
realized there was a story to be written here. When you take Special
Ed. Students out into the real world and help them to work for a
supervisor and with fellow workers, some crazy, strange, wonderful and
sometimes not-so-wonderful things happen. I gave my experiences to
Amanda Snow, the protagonist in The Job Coach. I
had to change so many aspects concerning my students so as not to
identify any of them that I decided to call The Job Coach a
novel. I did that for two reasons: first, because I would never
identify my kids, and second, because—if I did—I would probably go to
jail. It is unlawful to identify Special Ed Students. Since it was
going to be a novel, I decided to add the mystery feature.
Since
I
have a rather long history in printing and publishing, once The Job Coach
was ready to be published, I decided to publish it myself. I hope you
enjoy reading it, because it’s impossible to tell you how much I
enjoyed writing it.
So that was the
work
experience that Errol's novel came
out
of, which, I would say, gives it its primary strength. You get to
know Amanda's students as she does (he has an excerpt telling how
Amanda came to know her most difficult student, "Neta-Rose, Snow-Angels
and Ducks," on his web-site, which is an
excellent example)--and you hope for them to succeed.
Then
Errol established
the Golden City Publishing Company the
first week
of 2004 here in
Topeka, its first task to publish 1300 copies of the The Job Coach.
Then
he personally got out and
sold those books, not only in libraries and bookstores, but coffee
shops,
grocery stores, shopping malls, and, if it could be arranged,
meet-in-the-streets book signings
(even into the neighboring states). Anyone who has tried that
knows how difficult it is--but that edition is sold out. To quote Errol
again, "a new and improved" second edition will soon be published, and
there are
plans to market it through "large and mid-size corporations
nationwide . . . at a considerable savings for bulk purchases."
I got to know
Errol
pretty well when, in the process of promoting his book, he
became very active in
District 1 of
the Kansas Authors Club (based here in Topeka), so active that he was
elected District
1 president--just in time to be in charge of the annual state
convention, which will take place in Topeka next month--so everyone in
the group has come to know him well.
But I got to know
Errol even better when both of us were working with Esther Luttrell
learning how to
turn a novel into a complete film script (holding it to
about 120 pages, so it would make a two-hour movie). He did
a nice job with that, and a few months ago I was one of the readers
at a public reading of his script.
As Errol said
above, he
turned the exciting experience
of working as a job
coach over a period of years into a novel (to protect the names of his
students). While you can learn a lot about that
experience, and its importance from The Job Coach,
the book is
definitely a novel, opening with an incident in which the heroine,
Amanda Snow, quits her job working for a printing firm because of
flagrant sexual harassment, and takes steps to sue her guilty
boss. She
lives with a grandfather who has been her main support, but who, since
he is
beginning
to suffer from loss of memory through the Sundown Syndrome, gradually
turns her into the
responsible adult. She has fallen in love with Bill Jasco, a
private detective, and their love is tested variously. Amanda is
kidnapped by men who mean to kill her, so
Bill must undertake to rescue her--and I'll leave it for you to find
out how
and by
whom she is rescued in the surprise ending of the book. Through
all of this
the author uses the devices of conflict and suspense of the novel
to hold your attention--with a
crisis in almost every chapter.
I'm still trying
to
catch up with him in the adaptation of novel to script (which, again,
is not easy). He is trying to sell his
completed script now, and that experience has involved him in revising
both the novel and the projected film. I think he has a nice project
going, and I wish him well.
If you want more
information, go to his earlier
website:
goldencitybooks.com, or the new web site he is just developing to bring
things up to date. Or you can write to him at:
Golden City
Publishing
116 NW Knox Ave.
Topeka, KS 66606-1338
Phone:(785)232-3853
Email: errol@goldencitybooks.com
Website: goldencitybooks.com
The third
thing
I decided to do with this Web Site was to reach out that third of the
way
around the world to offer, an author a month, a survey of:
In March of 2000
I offered a Foreword,
describing my own discovery of Japanese Literature in the summer of
1973,
and the
Introduction to a book surveying
Japanese literature that I was working on, theoretically for
high-school
students. In April I began discussing individual authors with an
essay I had published in Inscape in 1974 on the
availability
of Mishima Yukio. He was the
best
place to begin then, and, in my judgment, still is--was selected by The
East magazine as the most important Japanese writer of the
20th
century. So Mishima is the dominant figure (for me at least)--is
still the most available--and I added my Modern Noh Play,
Mishima,
in September, 2001, my essay on his novel,
Forbidden Colors,
in November, 2001.
But I then decided to
pursue, for the next five
months
of 2000, not the full tradition of Japanese literature, which that
short
book for high school students considers, but, instead, as with Mishima,
availability.
I presented an overlapping history of 20th-century Japanese
fiction,
generation by generation, through five more of its practitioners: Natsume
Soseki (1867-1916) , Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965), Kawabata
Yasunari (1899-1972--Nobel Prize, 1968), (Mishima
(1925-1970)
would come here), Abe Kobo (1924-93), and
Oe Kenzaburo (1935-Present--Nobel
Prize, 1994) . I elected to do this because modern
novelists
are easier for an American reader to approach, these writers are all
major
novelists, all available in multiple titles in English translation,
and,
while very different from one another, form a tradition the reader can
easily come to understand. I added
Dazai Osamu (1909-1948),
and Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), as two other important
figures
in my own experience of Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction, before
beginning
the more general review of Japanese literature.
In December, 2000, I
began to introduce the longer
tradition
of Japanese literature by considering the monumental classic,
The
Tale of Genji, written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu exactly
1000
years earlier. Then, for 2001, I began the chronological
consideration
of Japanese Literature, from 712 A.D. to the present, by presenting the
first Japanese book, the Kojiki, largely through my
translation
of a contemporary children's book presenting one of the well known
stories
from that classic, followed by my favorite Japanese poet, who lived in
the tenth century,
Ono no Komachi, and a third great Heian woman
writer,
Sei Shonagon, who wrote The Pillow Book.
Then I moved to the Medieval Period by presenting my translation of Kamo
no Chomei's
Hojoki (for which I have an increasing fondness
the longer I live), then the better known medieval classic, The
Tale
of the Heike, the military epic of the Heike clan from 1153 to
1181 that established the samurai values in Japanese literature that
then
run from the Noh drama of a century or so later through the work of
Yukio
Mishima. Then I offered Zeami Motokiyo
(1363-1443), and the
first of the three great Japanese theatre traditions, The Noh Drama,
then the writer most closely associated with the development of the
other
two Classical Theatre Forms, Kabuki and Bunraku, in the
following
period, the "Floating World" of Tokugawa Japan, Chikamatsu Monzaemon,
then the other two writers of the big three of that Golden Age of the
Japanese
Renaissance, the novelist Saikaku, and the poet Basho.
I began my close by offering the second item on Mishima, the
Modern
Noh play I wrote of that title, that was performed in four places in
Kansas
in 1983 (or that Jack and Jordan do in New York in 1973--before I wrote
it). Then I offered an essay I wrote a few years ago on the
contemporary
playwright
Betsuyaku Minoru, four of whose plays I translated for
my second Master's thesis in 1985, then another item on Mishima,
an essay on his Forbidden Colors I presented at a
professional
meeting over twenty years ago. I closed in December, 2001, with,
a paper I presented December 8, 2001, at the Saturday Night Literary
Club
here in Topeka, Three Heian Women.
As I come back to work
on this web site, the project
I
plan to take on in Japanese literature is a review of the early 20th
century
novelist Natsume Soseki. I have
revised the essay I wrote on him earlier, as part of the book on
Japanese
literature I planned for high school students. Then I plan to
review
one of his novels each month, to complete a long essay (or short book)
on Soseki, since I now consider him the greatest Japanese
novelist,
and will be pleased to re-read his work.
To access the
earlier essays on the Japanese
authors
named above, see Japanese Authors.
* *
*
* *
That was my
game plan--modified en
route.
As it happens, in the last two-thirds of my career at Washburn I found
three largely extra-curricular activities (following Emerson's Law of
Compensation)
to replace the teaching experience in the Great Books of Western
Literature
I had watched evaporate around me:
1. From the summer of
1973
to this very day I have been a student
(and
sometimes teacher) of Japanese Literature (even if I've often neglected
it).
2. Then, at the beginning of
Summer
School, June 1, 1975, I began writing my novel, finally The
Bridge
of Dreams (but on that day the only thing I was sure of was
that
it would have 24 chapters).
3. Then, with the death of
Bob Woodley,
in the summer of 1976, I became more active with local writers--as his
surrogate. We did the first Inscape published by
Headwaters
that fall (which contained the sonnet I now present as part of my
comment
on Bob). In October of 1980 we established the Woodley Press in
Bob's
memory, which has now published over 40 books in this twenty-five plus
years-- poems, plays and stories by Kansas authors--in most cases that
author's first book. In July, 2004, the Woodley Press published
my Collected
Sonnets (fifth edition), and it is still publishing one or two
Kansas authors a year.
All in all, it hasn't
been a bad trade-off for me
personally,
whatever it may have been for a generation of Washburn students, who
have,
indeed, in this academic open market, chosen for themselves. Now,
though officially retired for over fourteen years, I'm still offering
these
doors as opening into a Liberal Education from my side of the
university,
which, in the supremely open market of the world wide web, a passer-by
may choose to enter--or, of course, may pass on by to more appealing
sites.
I had originally intended to add supplementary
items,
as, way back when,
I linked Bridge 3 and Bridge 4 by providing Jack's
script
for
but have no others in mind at present.
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