September 2025

Hello Friends. 

Forgive me if I’ve told this story before, but it is sort of worth telling again. When I told Lea that I had been accepted by the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, she knew I was going to go there. Kerouac was a guy who never stopped writing. He just couldn’t help himself. When he died, he was working on a book. When he was half-cocked in Mexico and too drunk to hold a pen, he was writing a poem in his head. He wrote about love, loss, and life, but mostly, he wrote about writing. In The Dharma Bums, he says, “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” Words mattered to him, and a college named for him made perfect sense to me. 

If I hadn’t gone there, I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter. While I didn’t write the Austen Chronicles during my time there, I did learn how to write a novel. I’d struggled for years with how to crack the code on that, but while there, I figured it out. After working for two years and paying attention and studying, and writing and writing and writing, I got to graduation and realized that I couldn’t stop writing. I don’t want to stop writing. 

I came to Kerouac the way most people do; I read On the Road in high school. I was a straight-edge kid, so the drugs and the booze didn’t appeal to me. I was restless, though. There was an appeal to the road part of the novel. The world was a big place, and I wanted to get out there and see it. I took my first solo train trip across Michigan when I was 14 (the legal way, not the boxcar way), and I am pretty sure I read that book again on that trip.

After I read On the Road a few more times, I finally got my hands on a copy of what became, and what remains, my favorite work by Kerouac, The Dharma Bums. It was with that book that I realized it wasn’t the story that was on the move, but his language. Sure, most of his books are about wandering. He was a merchant marine after he dropped out of college. He was looking for something that he never found, and while the characters are bustling about, the words he uses demand your attention. 

For example, in the first full paragraph of Chapter 12 of The Dharma Bums, he writes:

Then suddenly everything was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy run­ning down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bounc­ing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world… 

I wanted to run down that mountain too, and so I was inspired to take road trips and drive endlessly, with no particular plan in place. Over the years, those road trips to nowhere took me through Indiana cemeteries, into Iowa sunrises, up and down the Rocky Mountains, through Nevada deserts, and to an Arkansas pizza place where I heard the hallucinogenic tale of how the server got her name. I saw national parks, and roadside junk, and of course, I visited the place where national treasures and gaudy overindulgence meet, Graceland. 

In his beautiful books about ugly people, he says the inside stuff aloud. It is why people got his characters and his real-life persona mixed. There is nothing fake about his fiction except for the names. He poured himself on the page.  It doesn’t matter if the book takes place in the real world or in a fantasy world; the story only works if we can believe in the characters. They need to do things that we believe they would do, so we can learn the real lessons.

Big Sur is a book that is full of longing and pain. Jack, the main character who isn’t exactly him, but obviously is him, is desperate to find someone to love. We root for him because he is so honest about his feelings, but he just couldn’t make it work. Sure, he gets in his own way, and he admits it. Here, too, I learned a lesson. I know that home isn’t a place but a person. I found my person, but Jack, neither the fictional nor the real one, ever did. 

Still, in this heart breaker of a book, he manages to offer some incredible wisdom. It is maybe the most important thing he ever wrote. It is here, in this one sentence, that brings me back to him over and over. He says, “The best thing to do is not be false.” 

Simple words, but obviously the right ones.

Notes from my headphones

The R.E.M. album I listened to while writing this was the criminally overlooked New Adventures in Hi-Fi. It got good reviews, because it is really good, but people didn’t really buy it. It is one of those records only R.E.M. nerds really remember. It didn’t have a banging hit, but it does have “Eclectrolite” on it. I love, love that song. The piano on it is beautiful. Stipe’s lyrics are just what they should be. Quiet and puzzling and an instrument unto themselves. 

I feel that I would be remiss to mention that fellow introspective rockers, 10,000 Maniacs, have a glorious song called “Hey, Jack Kerouac.” It is worth a listen. I absolutely gave it a spin this week. 

Notes from my bookshelf

Obviously, I have been reading lots of Kerouac. I won’t get into it here. As a counterpoint, I read Greg Rouka’s Lois Lane: Enemy of the People. It came out in 2019, and I missed it somehow. Feels like it could have been written yesterday. Lois and former Gotham City police detective, Renee Montoya, in her superhero guise as The Question, do battle in the name of the Truth (Capital T TRUTH). It is so good. It is on Hoopla Digital, so you can give it a go with just your library card. 

I also read Edith Wharton’s travel book In Morocco. I had no idea she was a travel writer, but boy, it makes perfect sense. My father was stationed in Morocco, so I’ve heard a lot about it and seen some pictures, but Wharton’s words paint all the best pictures.

Notes from my keyboard

This morning, around 2 AM, I woke up and wandered into my office to write something down. Something I thought Cat would say. I don’t remember my dreams, so I have no idea what was going on. I actually forgot all about it until lunch today. When I looked at the note, it was totally illegible. I mean, my handwriting is awful, but I normally can read it. Not today. Hopefully, it will come back to me. 

Clearly, Cat has a lot to say, and I need to give her more time. I am working on it. I am just shy of 50K words, and hopefully, I will be past that number by the time this newsletter reaches you. She is in Mansfield. She has made some new friends and met one of the villains of the piece. Yes, there will be more than one, but that is the way for some heroines. They must fight their way through a group of marauders.

I started a new web series called Fireside Chats with A.R. Farina, where I spend a few minutes, twice a month, talking about books in general and Jane Austen in particular. You can watch and subscribe here.