Following Richard Brautigan

Following Richard Brautigan concerns a young writer of bad poetry living in Oklahoma City in the late 80s, who is visited by the ghost of the hippie writer Richard Brautigan. Jack, when the visitation occurs, is recovering from an aborted love affair, which coincidentally happened in San Francisco. That city becomes the focal point of the story, the place where magic can happen, a place seemingly out of time and between-worlds. The novel is a whimsical recounting of Jack s feckless life, his friends and lovers, his struggles with writing, and, then out of the blue, his singular haunting. Stylistically, it attempts to borrow some of Brautigan s goofball surrealism while establishing its own integrity. What begins as an off-center love story becomes for a while a road novel, as Jack and his ghost take to the highway and travel back to the scene, not only of Jack s affair but of the last days of Richard s life. Along the way they encounter lovely, loving women and an assemblage of Richard s friends, dead, alive, both. In San Francisco a transformative denouement awaits both of the novel s central figures. A portion of this novel won the Plan B Press Beat Writing Contest and was published by them as a chapbook.