After three years, and a long summer of writing and editing, writer Mark Jenkins and I have crafted what we are still calling an idea for a book. We’ve printed out 30 copies using Blurb’s self-publishing tools and have started sending them out to agents, editors and publishers. We used their trade book format, suggested by Blurb’s print evangelist, and my old friend, Dan Milnor, which I highly recommend for anyone looking to make their own books. We are always open to any ideas and suggestions on places we can submit.
OKLAHOMA DRIFT - CHASING BOB DYLAN’S AMERICA
When singer and songwriter Bob Dylan turned over his lifetime archives to a small museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we, like countless other fans, asked, Why Tulsa and why Oklahoma? The two of us - Mark as a professional writer/dramatist and Stuart as a professional photographer - set out on a journey to discover the answer. Three years and thousands of miles later, the answer to that question is this book. We hope to find an agent or publisher who sees its potential and can bring their own passion, along with editing and design skills, to the project. Its blend of photography and essay was consciously inspired by the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with writer and photographer working as equals, along with the chance encounters of Saint-Exupery's flying days, as well as Steinbeck's Travels With Charley. Stylistically, we attempted to emulate the vivid elegance of Joseph Mitchell's chronicles in The New Yorker of that city's characters and outliers, such as "Mazie," the ticket booth attendant at The Venice Theater.
We researched periods of Oklahoma's history, its movers and shakers, its artists and athletes, its heroes and villains, its mineral and agricultural bounties, and its booms and busts. We saw examples of its government's and citizens’ generosity and penury. We interviewed an infamous death-row inmate at the Big Mac, met a 109 year old survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, attended a raucous state school board meeting at the capitol, followed a traveling circus, and, by invitation, witnessed a private, sacred Osage ceremony. These pairings - thirty essays total - each represent a prose-poem resonating between the specters of Bob Dylan and the State of Oklahoma. Each illuminates the other.
Throughout our Oklahoma travels we witnessed in real life a world that paralleled the phantasmal world created by Dylan's art. In their strumming chords, poetic lyrics, and gravelly vocals, his songs echo Oklahoma's beautiful, cared-for farm country as well as its bereft, discouraged, used-up land and its communities under chronic stress. Here live hopeful, vital, forward-looking citizens as well as the homeless, the crippled, the desperate and the outcast - in essence, the hope and despair at America's heart.
"At this stage, I'm thoroughly impressed with the level of research, curiosity, insight and compassion on display on every page and in every word and photograph … I surely hope - and expect - that a publisher will recognize the vital importance of "Oklahoma Drift" and help you get it out into the world.”
- Steven Jenkins, Director of the Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma
