The Kerouac Project gave me plenty, though I am not really at liberty to discuss the economics, because I don’t think everybody has gotten the same, just depending on what is happening with the project at any given time.

I can say they pay you in free rent and free utilities and free food through use of a gift card at the local super market -they do not pay you in cash. So you will need money. You need money whenever anyway right?

It’s a wonderful house, a good part of town, and if you are sugar and spice and everything nice you will feel like a bit of a celebrity in town, you will be introduced as “the writer in residence” and sometimes you will be flattered and other times you will be embarrassed, or you will be bitter with the label.

People will repeatedly ask you what you do, what you write about, and you will answer as best you can, but depending on your mood, it may not be your best.

And you will gain at least five pounds because for three months you will have cupboards and a refrigerator full of food and beer and wine.

And time will go by fast and it will go by slow and you may feel like you didn’t accomplish anything with your time, but you will have accomplished plenty one way or another and so will feel accomplished.

And if you make your contact info available people will write letters to you because they feel a cosmic bond with you because in this context you are in a cosmic bond with Kerouac and Kerouac is maybe their hero. Then you will answers the letters and maybe very very few if any will write you back because you did not have the answer they were looking for and then you might probably feel as though maybe you were rude?

And others will come by the house and take pictures and walk around the yard embarrassed a bit, and maybe you will go out and meet them and give them a tour? And they may still feel embarrassed or worried that they are being a bother because you have “work” to do, after all you are the “writer in residence”, but you won’t mind because in some way you are helping them fulfill a wish.

Then your time there will be up and you will clean the house because that is the least you can do and it will look unrecognizable again and you will sign the guest book and you will go on.

Or you can just put the “do not disturb” sign in the window and keep it there until you leave.

The back room where he and mom stayed is one main room with slanted roof, here I am looking around at the little windows that go entirely along three sides and let in the light from the beautiful sunsets to the west right behind my back; often I open the door to the back yard to go out and look at the Spanish moss in silhouette. The windows have the very classic plastic Venetian blinds you find in most apartments, there’s a big desk other than the one I’m at, pushed up against the windowed west wall with a few chairs that I never sit in, and an old rolled up piece of carpet, nice checkered tile floor, some nice wicker chairs, and a book shelf that holds most of the knick-knacks on the east wall.

It gets hot back here even with air conditioning, and the little windows let in light, but it seems to ask to have more light, more glass, to really see the big live-oak trees, part of this lush eco system of Orlando which has more lakes, though I consider them ponds as most of them you can see the whole perimeter from one point, but has more lakes in its city limits than any other city in the US. There is one tiny bedroom back here which is now more like a 2nd bedroom or guest room as it only comfortably fits a twin bed, nightstand, and dresser, then a small bathroom with toilet and sink and stand up shower. The rest of the house is open and spacious with big kitchen, dining room, living room, master bedroom, full bath, and a great covered front porch. One has to wonder what that tight fit was like back here, if they shared the bedroom or the kitchen or had something rigged up back here to cook with and so on and so forth –plus all those people and girlfriends coming by to see Jack all the time staying days and nights.

So. Did Kerouac influence my writing? Sure. Yes. Certainly. Do you see that aesthetically or whatever? No. But let me say that Jack has influenced me, or my writing, as much as anybody else who has influenced me in any way really, in that I feel them in my heart.

Perhaps I have a bit of the Jack bug sitting here in his house and reading some of his books again for the first time in a long time and that is somewhat forcibly coming out in my typing here, an “in the spirit” sort of thing. However, I just read in The Kerouac Reader (those types of books I never saw any use for, thinking well hell just read the books you know, but now, wanting to get reacquainted so I can speak to a few things, I’ve found it very useful). As I was saying, in the essay Are Writers Made or Born? Jack makes a very clear showing of the difference between genius and talent, genius as originator, and talent, as yes talented, but a follower.

If we could all be talents with the know how sense of following our true heart instinct then maybe we would all be geniuses!

You can grow up emulating someone you love and learn from them, but whether it is life or art, if there’s even a difference, you better sooner or later at some time start emulating yourself. This isn’t advice or it is advice, but certainly it’s just my answer, because this is something I think about, and maybe most people think about when they write something or paint something or whatever, and someone comes up to them, and says, oh Sean I read your book, it really reminds me of so and so, and so you start to think, geez, I wonder why that is, and so you ask that person to clarify, and you read your book again, and you read more so and so…

As far as Jack’s books, one speaking to me more strongly than another, I have only read five of his books completely, On The Road got me started with reading anything of my own accord and that was Sophomore year in college, and really in the long run has much to do with the direction my life has taken, though never knowing that then or making a choice then, but a seed you know; Desolation Angels I’ve read a few times and really love that one; his poetry, some of his haikus I will never forget, as I used to have a tape of him reading/singing them, “All day long wearing a hat that wasn’t on my head.” “Bumble bee why are you staring at me? I’m not a flower.” “The hard-hearted old farmer, when he goes out he wears ear muffs, he has a double-bitted axe sharp enough to shave schick, oh baby, he’s as hard as can be…”

So, yes Kerouac has certainly influenced me more so than the fake plastic geranium that sits in the fire place here in the living room, so how do I answer to that prioritization!? Poor little neglected plastic geranium? How do I answer to the fact that I have read very very little John Cage, but my dear friend Kyle love’s John Cage, and so John Cage influences me in fact very directly?

Here it is 1240 and my friends left two hours ago after our weekly essay club meeting, in which tonight we discussed the first chapter (it is essay club and not book club) of Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Suddenly there we were sitting in the living room here in Jack’s old house and we are discussing very seriously with good humor this first chapter and suddenly Matt says, “It’s all Kerouac’s fault!”

So where and with what is your true heart instinct rebel consumed?

I was at work, at the appraisal job, meeting new people so I was often answering variations on the questions, “Where are you from?” and “What brought you to Orlando?” So, when I told my boss that I have two books published, and poems and reviews in various publications, and that I was the writer in residence here, she was somewhat surprised that I was working where I was, and even more surprised when I said that this residency was the first time I had gotten paid for my writing, and I kind of wanted to ask her you know, well, when was the last time you bought a poetry book? But I didn’t do that, I was polite about it I suppose and then of course work had to be done.

From my experience, and I want to be very frank, because few people were with me, the MFA, at least an MFA in Creative Writing does not translate into any kind of job really in the writing industry. Nor does it translate into a decent teaching job, a few friends have taught at Community Colleges, but it simply wasn’t worth it, my roommate did it one semester so I lived very close to what that was like for him, he loved teaching, but in the end, there were too many kids, too many requirements, and too little pay for him to give the kind of time needed for that job and live comfortably. A teaching job at a major University where you have more than one class, and have insurance benefits, and all that, is certainly out of the question right out of Grad school. Do I regret my MFA? No, not at all. It was such an eye opening experience at Naropa. I certainly wish I didn’t have to pay for it. I don’t think education is something anyone should have to pay for.

So, I think if you want to do it your way, you want write what you want to write and that’s all you want to do then yes you probably have to be prepared to die in debt and live a poor life with your mother. Now that means you just have to be prepared for it, it doesn’t mean that’s how it’s going to work out. Because of course there are always examples of exactly the opposite, where I think perhaps Wallace Stevens is one of the more famous examples, or even William Carlos Williams.

And you know Kerouac had success, but he certainly didn’t make a decent living from his writing, in his letters he is always talking about asking someone for money to do something. Too, he drank away much of his earnings.

So you know, I think you’re either in it for the money or you’re not and if all you want to do is make money you can easily find one way or another of making money if that is all you care about and you don’t care how you make it. Maybe that is the thing about artists you know, I don’t know, but money, the type of security that goes along with money, simply isn’t the first priority. And I do think that money as a priority is a very sad state of affairs.

And that is our problem! Changing priorities in this culture, being able to do what you love with love with no other concern and have it be considered a valuable contribution to society, creating a mass culture that doesn’t say, “I got mine, you better get yours.” -But a culture of compassion where people are not afraid. That is why I am so serious about the complexity of communicating with the world and coming in touch not just with our potential, but with our actual physical realization of that potential to the best of our abilities in the present time.

The rebel is rebel as advisor and as adversary where there’s kind of a strange linguistic relationship even though they don’t share the same root word, where “advice” is Latin videre = to see. And “adverse” is Latin vertere = turned against. And “advertise” is Latin advertere = to warn.

I’ve been told a few times that I am a rebel, an iconoclast, or that I like to play the bad boy. And I can only assume that people have thought so of me more than I have been told so. It is not an attitude of mine of which I am unaware, but it is one that I often get caught up in sometimes to a fault and I have just now cut and pasted segments from a statement by my friend Bob Doto who is now the managing editor of Parabola Magazine in NY which speaks directly to the misguided aspect of the rebel:

1. To start I would that to simply say: yes we all have baggage so now what? Is to miss a very great opportunity. This isn’t a therapy session (although for some may be therapeutic) but a chance to first acknowledge that our own perceptions and judgments of a piece are very much our stuff. It’s not enough to just say “next” because something happens when a person truly “owns” their comment. These aren’t opposites: judgment and self-reflection, like you do one or the other and they have equal and opposite manifestations. To own your shit is a practice at really employing a democratic process or dare I say anarchic process.

It’s also not about not saying you don’t like something. It’s about going beyond that for yourself -not for me. Ultimately I can care less if you’re not into my stuff, but it only benefits you to go deeper into what you may think a piece sucks. In doing so you may also open up an opportunity for conversation rather than take stakes on a position. This isn’t about being gentle. This is radical presence, checking ourselves first.

This idea that you’re you and I’m me is just a dead end. It goes nowhere. Because from what I have seen that mentality simply demarcates separate non-communitive quadrants. Subgenres and such that claim, hey we don’t care what they do as long as they don’t care what we do, just leaves a stale scene. The objective is to communicate. Unless you’re just a writer in your room expressing yourself and just hoping someone will care…

2. I do not think writing is pure form or a form that should be purified. What I think you are missing is that if you are writing to “capture” a thought, then you have already missed the boat. The language-writers attempted to show us that the word itself was the thing. Investigate the word. We put so much attention on the idea outside of the word, or the thing pointed to by a word, that we miss the underlying politics in language/syntax. So in this sense, it’s not like: “damn, I missed it again. I just couldn’t capture my thoughts well enough,” but rather “is there a way that I can engage people in the “process” of word/language making? Is there a way that I can elucidate the possibly hidden agenda in language itself?

3. As far as baggage is concerned. This is hermeneutics. This is the “how” we read texts. This is ridiculously important since we as humans are interpreters and need to interpret. What we have within Islam and all spiritual traditions is a war of interpretation. This “baggage” that we bring to a piece and investigating it is so necessary that without it you have planes flying into buildings, bombs over Baghdad, occupation of Palestine and mine and your world as we know it thrown completely into amok. That is the direct result of a sidestepping of the baggage issue. The occupation of Palestine is directly related to hermeneutics (what baggage we bring to writing) of spiritual texts. We need to recognize what we bring to a piece of writing etc… So that we don’t end up assaulting and marginalizing women, other races, etc…

The study of how we read the world is a pro-human practice. Not that you can’t check someone else as well, there is no one or the other here. This is about making a conscious effort to REALLY engage our own reading and handicaps. If we were to live in a place that was making up a constitution today or everything got fucked up and babies had limbs blown off and there was a new constitution being drawn up, you’d be damn sure to check the interpretation of that language and how it is going to be interpreted. To watch the constitution unfolding in Iraq is ridiculous. I go to websites where young Iraqis are tracking the wording of the document from day to day, tracking what was left out the next draft or what was put in. They understand that someone is going to have to interpret this document when someone steals an orange; they want to know what is going to happen to that person. How will the law be interpreted? In the states, checking the baggage of a judge is going down right now with Roberts. People want to know his political history. Why? Because they want to know what baggage he brings to words like: rights, abortion, affirmative action, civil liberties. How does he read those words? What I am calling for here, is that what we are doing is in a way a practice for reading the larger world. Poetry has always stressed that in some form. The idealist says that poetry takes the literal world and recontextualizes it in such a way as to hopefully make the reader re-assess their assumptions about what they see. (now of course from this there is much to talk about) but maybe you see my point. I’m much more interested in WHY you say: why bother, then you simply saying: why bother. But I ask you to tell me, so I don’t have to tell you or anyone else in that position.

This is really a care package. Because when someone makes a comment I immediately want to know why they feel that way. And it’s better if they already know than putting me in the position of having to make up my own story.

Well, that is very heavy. I bring this all to attention because it is such a delicate matter don’t you think, this divide we all find ourselves playing some part in one way or another within this writhing political quandary of how to proceed with what is best for all of us. Even in our own personal friend and family relationships. I think Bob makes a very legitimate “argument” on how to go about dealing with those moments where there is a clash in communication.

Here I am in a funny position, much like you are in a funny position, where we have our “vantage” points, so aren’t we all guest lecturers! Here Junior has said it would be good for me to join you from Jack’s old house and that is great and that is kind of my inlet, or context, in the way that there are weekly assignments for you. When I asked Junior what he would like me to speak about he had that great non-interference thing going on. So then I get here and I thought at first there was supposed to be talk about T&C, but that is next week, so it is just me this week, me and you, and then I read that I have an interesting vantage point into Kerouac and I start to wonder what does Junior think my vantage point is, what do I think my vantage point is? I certainly don’t consider myself a Kerouac scholar. But my vantage point is that I am benefiting directly here at the house and at Naropa because of Kerouac’s life and the lives of many others. So in some way I come roundabout to say that I am talking about being beneficial.

One of my theater professors at The University of Memphis once asked me to help another student with some problem or other that I was having the same difficulty with and I looked at her, and I said, how can I help this person when I am having the same problem and don’t have the answer, and she told me, “Once taught, twice learned.”

Everyone I’m assuming knows that move when you are sitting next to someone closely shoulder to shoulder and a bond of friendship urges you to move your head to lean on their shoulder, which in turn often urges them to move their head to lean on your head. To have your head on their shoulder is one thing. And to have their head on your shoulder with your head on their head is another. Neither are difficult. There is stillness. Can you remember the last time, or all or a few of the times this physical arrangement happened in your lives? So it is stillness I am feeling today. For various reasons, none at all by any means sorrowful, I feel I need that shoulder to rest on.