Over at Medusa’s Muse we’re (the almost indefatigable publisher, Terena, & I) simultaneously giving ourselves a crash course in promoting our first book, Traveling Blind (buy it!), and figuring out how to infiltrate the world of (mostly underground) punk rock as we solicit stories for an anthology to be released next fall (which, if all goes according to plan, will be our third title).
The book will be called Punk Rock Saved My Ass, and the title describes in language as straight and to the point as punk itself what the common thread of all the stories — and artwork, comics, photos and anything else we can collect and reproduce in ink on paper — will be. Here it is in words less bald: transformative stories about the ways the the punk rock scene can empower people. Stories of a person’s journey through punk and what effect that has had on the way he or she lives and sees the world.
Finding people willing to tell stories that are worth telling has been an adventure. I started with a couple of former classmates in a graduate sociology course at Northeastern University who declared a little shyly but nonetheless proudly at some point during class discussions (the topic: sociology of deviant behaviour) that they were or had been involved in the punk scene. One of them suggested I try posting my request for tales on Boston Punk, a forum for — state the obvious — punk rockers in and around Boston.
Bingo.
Within days of my post I netted two bandmates (Faulty Conscience – check them out!) who didn’t know they’d both agreed to be interviewed by me until they discovered the coincidence in a conversation one night during band practice.
One had but a short tale to tell; the other has a story that encompasses most of his approximately three decades alive. This story he is telling and I am recording over the course of a series of interviews. This process started out fun and fairly light (it’s all relative), but a couple of weeks ago we reached his tale’s painful core, which we had intended to cover in one session. In our last meeting his flow of words, which had up to that point gushed so that my wrist ached and my hand felt by the end of each two or three hour interview as though it were seized in a rigor mortis of pen clench, sputtered and jerked for an hour and a half and then stopped.
“Let’s try and finish this part next time,” I said, mentally revising our sketched out schedule of sessions. He agreed, uncharacteristic relief in his voice, so we packed up and left the pub. We parted at the T station, and as I strolled along the streets of Cambridge’s Central Square back to my car I felt myself being hit by the reality of what he’d been through. Up until that night this process — he telling his story, me recording it — had been for both of us a kind of lark, fun and exciting because of the nature of the subject and because nobody else was doing this or had ever thought of doing this (as far as we know).
But that night the reality of an unrecoverable six years of his young life hit home in both of us. I realised that what I was recording was not just a tale of adventure and anarchy (albeit with a lot of suffering of all kinds) that ends in a happily ever after kind of way, but the story of an injustice and prejudice that cost a man six years of his life that should have been spent partying, flirting and setting out upon his path as an adult.
But, while he was taking his first steps along it, that path was warped and plunged into a dungeon.
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More about how I’m finding garrulous — and literary! — punk rockers in the next post.
Stay tuned …
