Author Talk by Jim Gibbons

  Flashbacks: A Memoir 

Sat Dec 16th

2-3 p.m.

 Jim Gibbons' writing career started his junior year in high school when he made the wrestling team, but noticed his school newspaper didn't cover the team's recent victories. He complained to the editor, who countered, "Do you wanna do it?" Gibbons did it and became sports editor the following year. As an English major at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he took a required course he hated called Structural Linguistics, and decided he liked poetry much better. Gibbons' first book of poems, Prime the Pump, was printed by Morgan Press in 1970, and before long he was published in newspapers, magazines, and poetry anthologies with some of his favorite poets, including Richard Brautigan, Charles Bukowski, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O'Hara, Jack Kerouac, Anne Sexton, Lew Welch, Phillip Whalen, William Carlos Williiams, and Al Young, to name a few. Gibbons dropped out of college his last semester and headed west, ending up at Gate 6 in Sausalito, joining other dropouts living free on the water during the 70s era of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll." He converted a 22' lifeboat into a sailboat he named the Cowpie, sailed it around the San Francisco Bay, met many local celebs, from Alan Watts to Shel Silverstein, and hung out with a local band called The RedLegs. From there he moved to Mendocino County in Northern California with his new woman, built a small far-from-code cabin in the woods, and helped raise his two sons. In 1977 he went back to college to get his teaching credential, got into running, taught and coached in the Willits Unified School District, and wrote a weekly running column called FootNotes for the Willits News. Many of these stories have recently been published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, a weekly out of Boonville that continues "FANNING THE FLAMES OF DISCONTENT."