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My business card says Jack Saunders, Vernacular Writer. At the top, is a
triangle with an exclamation point, and the legend WARNING: Their shit
don't stink.
I draw parallels between my work and that of outsider visual artists: I
am self-taught, at odds with the literary establishment, as prolific as a
mental patient in an insane asylum, and I work in long, connected series
of books, related thematically, which I call cycles.
As in The Bicycle Cycle. Or Tlacomiztli, in which I attended a folk art
show in Atlanta called Souls Grown Deep, visited Howard Finster's
Paradise Garden, and saw Woody Long at Folk Fest '96 in the North Atlanta
Trade Center. Woody painted musicians on my son's fiddle case.
My son Owen plays bluegrass for a living. An idiom in the folk
tradition. And most of my friends are parking-lot pickers, who don't
make a living playing music, but play for the love of it. Working at a
day job to support their art, or craft, or hobby.
The IRS considers my expenses hobby losses, and won't let me deduct them.
I don't see why it would corrupt my purity to make the same sort of
living publishing my books as Howard Finster or Woody Long make painting,
or Owen makes playing bluegrass. It's not like he wears a cowboy hat and
suits with sequins on them.
Check it out at glpbooks.com/oyb. Jack Saunders.
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