Books

Whoreson Dog (WSD) was a literary journal that my friend and I cobbled together while in college. We posted hundreds of flyers and were thusly rewarded with a decent turnout of contributors including a hand-printed manila envelope from Charles Bukowski. I’d heard that Buk continued to send work up until his death in 1994. His submission to us included a stack of original poetry and some pen and ink drawings. In return, I dropped a dozen bottles of Thunderbird with a custom WSD label onto his San Pedro porch. He followed up with another generous submission a week later.

We thanked him for both packages, and he wrote back saying that he didn’t even realize that he’d sent the first one at all. He never mentioned the Thunderbird. Since then, I’ve gotten dozens of requests to buy copies of the magazine from Bukowski fans, international grad students doing their thesis on Bukowski and even rare book sellers who wanted to buy all of my correspondence (not for sale).

There was a follow up issue of Whoreson Dog that had been printed with a four-color cover. It had an impressive list of contributors including work by poet Spoon Jackson, a prison inmate from Tennessee that is serving a life sentence. My co-editor took a last minute job in Japan, and he bailed on his apartment, leaving all of the printed pages that were waiting to be collated for the bindery. For everybody that submitted work and have wondered what happened, I sincerely apologize.

Nonfiction
One of the first things that I did as a working writer was to write and/or edit seven text history books for a couple of academic publishers. These books were sold to libraries and schools and used by students to write essays, reports, etc. I choose the periods of American history that I was especially interested in such as the Great Depression and Prohibition. I haven’t thought of until recently but notice that a few of them actually get decent reviews on Goodreads.

Fiction
This is what I’m currently working on. More later.