May 11, 2013 - Madison. An entry before I head out to Windom, MN, where I play later tonight at the River City Eatery. Looking forward to seeing Mari, Bruce, Ivan and the others I've come to know there. Windom has become a bit of an oasis along the highway.
Today, here in Madison, the sun is out, but the wind is blowing and its cold - like a North Slope (Alaska) Summer. Brisk enough to make you wonder why you left your winter hat at home, only to remember it is, afterall, May....
I chose Madison for a break as a reminder of sorts. I remember first coming here to see the town after College 1982. I gave my friend Wendy Barron a ride here from Bard. She was moving to Madison and, as we drove into the town, I came up State Street and was taken aback by the life of the place. I came back a couple of times after that. I still remember finding a copy of "The Water of the Wonderous Isles", a William Morris book published here in the 1890's.... My thrill and fear of paying over $100 for a book, back before I'd really begun to collect in earnest. In many ways it sparked those journeys of mine from town to town seeking out old bookstores between gigs.
This time Madison seemed different. It had changed, I thought, before I realized that it was less Madison that had changed (though indeed it has). It was me. The excitement of the college scene was part of what drew me in the first time. The thrill of discovery of a book I had heard of but never found was the fascination of the next visit. But a College scene is a college scene. And I now saw that there were far more bars than bookstores and, walking through the town, felt a sense of distance, perhaps alienation.
There is an earlier memory, though of Wisconsin, not Madison. I was driving cross country in winter - back to Alaska from the East Coast. It might have been 1980. I stopped at a rest area and a guy there saw my plates. What do you do? he asked. I'm a writer I said, for that was how I saw myself at that moment. I wasn't a writer, really. I had written some, but it didn't seem real. I was imagining my life in that moment before I responded and I saw it flash before me in a way that I had not before. The memory stays with me - not because I created my own little fiction that day, though I think that is part of it, but because it marked a point when I decided who I was, knowing even then full well that this would be no easy task. Today I have friends who are writers - Keith Liles, Matt Frank, Charles Wohlforth, Jesse Browner, Tim Mason, my Brother Nick among others, but whether or not it is a song, or a sonnet, an essay or a blog, it is a body of work, it is writing. And so, here in Wisconsin again, I can say when asked, "I am a writer, a musician..." We define our lives. We define our selves.