About the Books
Dawn Peyote
It’s a duality of drunkenness and sobriety, it’s a before and after, Ant Man was mostly written before I sobered up, and Dawn Peyote was written after I had completely sobered up, it’s a big difference, it was a big life change. On top of all that, I was starting a new life in a new place, I had decided to stay in Owatonna rather than move back to my hometown of Rochester, Minnesota. So there I was, in my new apartment with a computer, and I just started writing Dawn Peyote within a year or two of living there. I went back to the events that led up to moving to a new town, how I overdosed on lithium, and the severe psychosis that occurred because of that. I wrote about being in the psyche ward several times in the autumn, and then in the springtime too. It’s always a learning process when it comes to schizophrenia, that and a lot of tough love, Dawn Peyote chronicles those two things, those two ways of existence, for some it’s an Infinite Jest, and for the mentally ill it’s an infinite test. There’s kind of an abstract flow with a lot of Dawn Peyote, streams of consciousness you could say, and maybe it’s another duality, bouncing back and forth with that automatic writing style and then with the linear, straight narratives. That’s what I like about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, that mental mix of things and situations and mindsets, just rolling with the societal anarchy with his anarchic literature, and with my own writing Henry Miller is usually what I’m shooting for.
Ant Man
I lived in the Twin Cities from 1990 until 1997, that’s where and when most of Ant Man takes place. My dad kind of pushed me to write the book, I’d come home from the Twin Cities to my hometown of Rochester, Minnesota, I’d tell my dad stories of what had happened to me up there, and he’d sometimes reply, “You should write a book about it,” so when I moved out of the Twin Cities and back to Rochester in the spring of 1997 I started writing Ant Man. I was living with my parents that spring and summer, writing a little everyday, I was sober, I was painting a lot of artwork in my parents’ garage, and I discovered the power of coffee. In September of 1997 I moved into my own apartment, I bought an electric typewriter, and that’s when I really started writing a lot, most everyday and every night. I also started drinking alcohol again at that same time, throughout the entire course of writing Ant Man I was on and off the wagon so much that it’s hard to remember certain patches of time, but two years later I would finally sober up for good. Music influenced the writing of Ant Man, two musicians in particular really affected me, Tom Waits and his cd Mule Variations, and John Coltrane’s Live in Seattle, that’s where a lot of the stream of consciousness writing came from, rhythm and chaos. I describe my life at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design quite a bit, I did take some writing courses there, but I also wrote on my own, mostly poetry. A lot of drinking and pot smoking ensued, with the occasional psychedelic trip as well, that was the atmosphere my friends and I lived in, it was both goofy and harrowing, drunk and stoned at night, hungover as hell in the daytime, back and forth like that for four years straight. Ant Man is sloppy and chaotic, just like how I was, mistakes and all, it’s still an accurate self-portrait. I went through art school as an undiagnosed schizophrenic and diabetic, that’s why I related so strongly to John Fante’s book the Brotherhood of the Grape, and I also took shelter in Bukowski’s books too, but my all-time favorite writer will always be Henry Miller, especially his New York City books. I spent several years on Ant Man, I’ve reread it at least a few times, but I don’t know what to make of it overall, and there are passages in the book that even I don’t understand.
Mongoose
Where Grilled Buddha was mainly inspired and influenced by Buddhism, Mongoose was mainly inspired and influenced by fairly modern philosophy, Nietzsche’s the Birth of Tragedy to be exact. Like reading through Kerouac’s books for the first time, I couldn’t really understand the Birth of Tragedy with my first reading of it, nonetheless, it was the inspiration and great influence on Loading Up the Now Zoo, the first set of poems in Mongoose, and I also didn’t logically understand the poems of Loading Up the Now Zoo as I was writing them down, it was kind of like being blind to the story and the meaning of it all. As Mongoose progressed I read other Nietzsche books as well, my favorite one being the Will to Power. Mongoose was all written down with pen and paper, sitting at my coffee table, listening to a variety of music, the words just seemed to come out of nowhere, I wrote them down without second guessing myself, and without revising them too, it was all a one time thing captured in the moment, gone and then here and then gone again, but written down for posterity. I feel like out of all my writings that Loading Up the Now Zoo is my best stuff, and I also feel like going into philosophy in general was a great life move for me, my mind finally opening up to the great unknowns. With a lot of the other poems in Mongoose I copied Kerouac, I carried around little notebooks wherever I went, so I was kind of like a poetic gypsy, or an esoteric journalist, writing down scraps of this and that. I had long switched from booze to coffee by the time I was writing Mongoose, I was drinking three pots of java everyday back then, coffee was and still is my elixir, even though now I only drink one pot of coffee a day. Mongoose starts out as a totally unconscious endeavor, but with each new section I was growing more and more conscious of the world around me, it wasn’t just me in the eye of a mental hurricane anymore, I branched out towards society, and I found that I was often either scared of it or I was disgusted by it, liars abounded wherever I went. Writing is great when you think about how much we forget, writing is a form of time travel, it goes back, it goes now, and it can go into the future.
Stewart Coates
I set out to write Stewart Coateswithout a style, you know, generically and plain, no razzle dazzle. I didn’t want to write like anyone else, and it was just my plain old self writing it out. I would like to call it an autobiographical novel, even though most of it was based on real life. I was very inspired by the Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, he wrote naturally about nature and himself, that was what I was trying to do too, just be my natural self while writing Stewart Coates. I think I spent about a year and a half writing Stewart Coates, it was lived as it was written and vice versa, day by day, sometimes even moment by moment, and without looking ahead to the future. I was always trying to type down the here and now in a singular and focused sense, trying to write exactly what I was seeing and feeling and thinking. It’s a book of experiences, and reading Stewart Coates you’ll get to see how my life unfolded back then, a gradation of my life.
Grilled Buddha
The seed of Buddhism was planted in my mind around Christmas time of 1997 when I checked out Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. I tried to read it the best I could, but it was a hard read for me at the time. A year or two later I bought Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, which is filled with Buddhist references, and so I read that book too, even though I didn’t understand it very well. The beginning of reading Jack Kerouac’s Some of the Dharma was also the beginning of me writing Grilled Buddha. Some of the Dharma is a big book, I wrote poems into the empty spaces of the book, usually off to the side of the page, and so Grilled Buddha is like a smaller version of Some of the Dharma in some ways. At the same time, I had really loved the poetry of e.e. cummings for many years. Kerouac and cummings were my two major influences, both technically and content-wise.
I was living in a halfway house when I started writing Grilled Buddha, that was autumn of 2000. I moved out of the halfway house at the beginning of August of 2001, and kept writing Grilled Buddha. I bought a copy of A Buddhist Bible not long after that, now that was a terrific read, right from the beginning I felt like I was home, and it moved me. I finished writing up Grilled Buddha in the fall of 2001, which meant that I had spent close to a year on the project.
Buddhism is a way of life, twenty four seven, a person asked me if I was going to join the Buddhists, and I replied, “Buddhism is not something you join, it’s something you realize.
There were two things I was consciously trying to get away from while writing Grilled Buddha, Christianity and Charles Bukowski, the former felt like a brainwash, and the latter was just an alcoholic. It had a lot to do with my schizophrenia, western religion was just a bunch of ridiculous fantasies, and with alcoholism I had to stay sober because I didn’t want to end up in the psyche ward again, so Buddhism took a lot of all those pressures off of me.
