Tuesday: Being in an autobiographical frame of mind…

It’s been a fast week for me; and now it’s Tuesday, the last day of my blogging on the Reading Victoria site, and I’ve been musing a bit about the writer’s life…my own life.

I’ve been writing an autobiography for the past thirty years. It’s first incarnation was called “A Few Sparks in the Dark,” and it was published in a magazine called Starship and a volume entitled Literary Masters. Later, at the request of Contemporary Authors, I revised and expanded the earlier work for their autobiographies series.  I found myself collaborating with two vaguely familiar past selves who called themselves Jack Dann. I called the revised autobiography “Sparks in the Dark,” and in 2007 Contemporary Authors asked me to write an update. That update turned into 15,000 words, which Contemporary Authors kindly accepted…and paid me as if it was an entirely new work. (A blessing on their heads!)  I called the last incarnation “Insinuations.”  The autobiography is due to be published as a limited edition hardcover by PS Publishing in England, and it will be called Insinuations.

As the limited edition has not been published yet, I would not put any of that material on the net, but I wrote an autobiographical introduction to my short story collection Jubilee. I thought “Out of the Blue” might be interesting to friends and readers. (I posted my afterword “Slip Me a Fiver” earlier. So now you have the front and back of that collection.)

I’ve enjoyed blogging. Thanks for all your feedback. And now back to that peculiar profession of being a writer, which means, alas, actually having to write!

Here is a small bit of autobiography…”Out of the Blue.” Seems like a nice way to end my blogging here.

Cheers!

The following acknowledgement must accompany the article or appear in the acknowledgment page: “Out of the Blue” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 2002 by Jack Dann. First published as the preface to Jack Dann’s retrospective short story collection Jubilee, 2002. All rights reserved by the author.

I dreamed of being a writer when I was in high school, and I clearly remember thinking that once I became a writer, I’d be…rich, and I’d have a limousine and a driver. Ah, the delusions of youth.

I almost died when I was in my 20’s. I was in hospital and was given a 5% chance of survival. The days and weeks and months were a series of stop-motion slides of agonizing pain and ice-blue Demerol dreams, pain, bliss, pain, bliss, and during the Demerol highs, I would ask my nurse for ice; I would place my hand in the ice and dream of “The Blue Country,” a place of ice mountains and constant blue twilight, my own metaphor for lonely peace and death.

After months of fighting for my life on a terminal ward where my friends died and the patients formed a secret club of those traversing the blue country, I began to recover. On my tray table beside the bed, I kept a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his youth in Paris, A Moveable Feast; and it became like a talisman for me. When I was too ill even to consider reading, I would put my hand on its cool covers…as if I could become a writer by osmosis. Later, I would read a passage or a page and enter Hemingway’s life, enter what the French author Jean Dutourd called the life of art. I associated books with life, with the juice and joy of being alive, and I felt…I felt that I had, in a sense, died and come back. I’d been given a second chance. And somehow that gave me the courage to take chances, live on the edge, live my dreams. I wasn’t afraid of failure. For a while, I wasn’t afraid of anything!

Thirty years later and I’m still living the dream, writing, stretching, reaching for that elusive, perfect image, living fast and hard and hot, and sometimes—when I’m sitting in front of the CRT screen and reaching for those images—I’m not afraid of anything.

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The stories that follow are living bits of my experience and memory…alchemical distillations of my fantasies, dreams, and nightmares. They are the fictional flesh of my musings.

Magicks…

And if I’ve done something right, some of their magic might come alive for you…become part of your experience and sense memory

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