An obvious question for my Dad was what was his road to writer and how and why did he find his home in non-fiction. As a second-generation writer I had my father, god father and many of my parents’ friends as shining beacons. But my father was from a different time. Still he started a magazine that lasted a year or two called Pastimes, worked for various news services and wrote books.
What was the first thing that you remember that you wrote something, not for a class but you being a creative writer? And my B question is when do you feel that you were committing yourself to a life of writing not as writing for itself, but as a writer who would put things out for other people.
That’s lost to me… Oddly enough the first real consciousness I have of writing a piece like that is in high school…because I never paid much attention to people when they told me to do things. I’d do it. So, I’d written things in high school that were for the paper but it wasn’t really the assignment. I remember the first published thing I did which was a piece of science fiction.
Do you have it still? Do you know the magazine?
Oh no. It burnt down on Dolores Street. I had an incredible science fiction collection. It all got burnt down at Liz’s (Bernheimer, my mom’s close friend who stored my dad’s mag collection in her basement where there was a major fire.)
The story was called “Side Effect Charlie” because Charlie made very basic discoveries, but he never noticed the side effects. Like he was the one who was responsible for the crystals that got people off into outer space. The only thing was the first time he tested it half a mountainside was reduced when they went off into space. And this was it. So, Charlie decided he was going to retire and that he was going to build a monument that was going to exist for all times. The monument itself was very simple. It was just a pendulum that swung backwards and forwards. But then he surrounded the pendulum with force fields and a number of other things so that if an inter-galactic war broke out and blew the earth’s orbit the pendulum would still swing.
So that’s what happened. He created the monument and called this press conference. They all were there and he flipped a switch nothing happened. Heart attack. He passed out. At the very same time somebody from Alpha Centari began looking toward earth and the solar system. That’s the first published story.
So why didn’t you do a Samuel Delaney and stay in sci fi?
Politics. I forget to add that at the time we talked about my doing stuff with education and the NAACP I had an education newsletter going, I had a correspondence with I.F. Stone. I was hung up with the notion of revolution and I had a mimeograph machine, devices down below for when it came down and we went to war I was capable of producing the literature. I never really got fixed in what I wanted to write. I got fixed on what I wanted to communicate. So then I did all this stuff, I did various and sundry essays, none of which got published. I was publishing articles with Sandy Close. The founder of Pacific News Service)
When did you start that magazine Pastimes?
That was in ’66 when we came back from Europe. (My father wanted his children to feel freedom so he and my mother planned a year long trip to Europe where lived in a tent and found out what freedom feels like.)
You’re writing fiction and nonfiction. At some point you hook up with Sandy Close (founder of Pacific News Service) and at some point you hook up with Jamie Jamison…
Sandy was a bit earlier. I hook up Jamie, post our trip. I know Cleaver, I know these people but they’re not part of my active life. I just know them. I met Jamie as part of the movement stuff, he was one of the printers. Milt Tuitt I met through Jamie, through this enterprise. He was the graphic designer. Jamie I had always known. Jamie (Jamison) was a part of the whole movement. There were two printers in town, one of them was Jamie and one of them was Julian Richardson .
Julian Richardson
So if you were doing a folder, a handout whatever you took it to Richardson, I think he was Success Printing, or Jamie which was Jamison Printing Company.
And so I got to know him there, but Jamie was always involved in wanting to be a publisher. That’s how we got together to try and do something. So we started going. We actually sold some copies of that thing.
Does that mean you had the one story published and then you didn’t publish for a while? Were you writing?
I was writing. I didn’t publish.
So you’re writing a lot of sci fi but you’re not sending it out.
I’m sending some out and the stuff I’m sending not getting it back. I had tons and tons written.
When we went overseas in ‘65 I was trying to write. I wrote whatever I wrote. When I came back that’s when Beverly introduced me to Eldridge Cleaver, that was October of 1966. Soon after I met Eldridge she introduced me to Bill Gray. Bill Gray said “Hey, you’re in with the Panthers you ought to write these people.” What happened was it was the very same time I was applying for EOP. (William) Morrow sent me a contract and at that stage I was in focus on “Panther” (His first book, “a Panther is a Black Cat”) and that kind of sealed what I did after that.
By the end of my father’s writing career in addition to his two published books A Panther is a Black Cat and Justice in the Round (a book about the Angela Davis trial) my father had a myriad of articles in newspapers and magazines around the world including Le Monde, Africa News, and Emerge. He was also a regular contributor to San Francisco’s Sun Reporter, Pacific News Service and was a New York Times stringer.