Saturday, August 05, 2017

memoir

I HAVE BEEN BUSY writing further in my memoir — "further," because I've already published a volume covering my first thirty years.

Getting There. Ear Press, 2007; 212 pages. Growing up in Berkeley, 1935-1945, and on a hardscrabble farm in Sonoma county, 1945-1952; college in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Berkeley; early marriage and children; beginning to learn about Modernism, writing, and the composition of music. ISBN 978-0-6151-5935-5 Available from Lulu 1487909, pb $20 (e-book $9.99, Lulu 18655161, iBookstore), or from such websites as Amazon.com

I've completed a first draft of the next volume, which runs from 1964 on to 1974 — years when I was on staff at KPFA and KQED, when I began teaching at Mills College, and began writing for the Oakland Tribune. This will probably run to 250 pages or so in print, and be subdivided into four main sections:

1: KPFA, 1964-1967
2: KQED, 1967-1972
3: Juggling Jobs, 1972-1974
4: In print, 1974-1976

As I've been working on this I've been struck by what an interesting time those years were, perhaps especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. I write about KPFA and my work there, of course, but also about family life, my musical composition, the musicians and others I got to know — and Berkeley as a backdrop.

But I may be overly enthusiastic. After giving some thought to the idea, I've decided to make the first section available as a pdf on my website. Interested readers can download it by clicking here where it should appear as a PDF running to 76 pages.

I ask that these pages not be printed out, or, if so, not distributed. I welcome any suggestions or corrections. And I reserve the right to take the pdf down from my website as time goes by…

And do let me know if you cannot find or download the pdf.

1 comment:

Charles Shere said...

A friend comments, in part (I wish we had a more private means of communication):

I read through about 1/3 of this a couple nights ago and then realized I needed to have a much better space of time to take it in. It's multilayered and deep. …

The one thing I noticed I was missing, though, is your own thinking about why you have been drawn to the forms and substance of expression that are often not very accessible to most people. I'm positive you have ideas about that, and it could be useful to others as they think about what shaped you and what is going on in their own lives - at any rate, I feel memoirs/biographies often do help in seeing things from a bigger point of reference. So glad you are doing this.

This sort of reflection begins to build in the next section of the memoir, which covers my years at KQED, roughly 1967-1972. Even then I did not "have ideas about that": such ideas only come now, almost 50 years later, as I write these things.