Jim McGarrah @jmcgarra offers #Memoir Workshop at the TYCA-SE #Conference Feb 22

February 22, 2018: Blue Heron Book Works author Jim McGarrah will offer a memoir workshop at the TYCA-SE (Two-Year College Association) 

Marine, social worker, carpet layer, janitor, bartender, race horse trainer, and college professor, Jim McGarrah lives in Louisville, Kentucky, close enough to Churchill Downs to hear the crowd roar each year at the Kentucky Derby.  His memoir of war, A Temporary Sort of Peace (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007) won the national Eric Hoffer Legacy Non-Fiction Award, and the sequel, The End of an Era, was published in 2011.  He is editor, along with Tom Watson, of the anthology Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review.  His most recent memoir, Misdemeanor Outlaw: A Confession of Life, was published in June 2017.

Jim is also a poet and author of three award-winning books of poetry: Running the Voodoo Down (Elixir Press, 2003); When the Stars Go Dark(Main Street Rag, 2009); and Breakfast at Denny's (Ink Brush Press, 2013).   His poems, essays, and stories appear frequently in literary journals such as Bayou Magazine, Breakwater, Cincinnati Review, Chamber Four, Connecticut Review, and North American Review.

For more information, please visit the conference website: http://www.tycase.org/2018-conference-info

Or visit the event's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/514318808952575/

Available here!

Misdemeanor Outlaw: Jim McGarrah's Path and Some #Boomer Criticism from a Gen Xer #genx

Vincent Francone

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi. 

#BHBW author Vincent Francone reviews Jim McGarrah's memoir, Midemeanor Outlaw

 

In his funny, self-lacerating look at Baby Boomers, Balsamic Dreams, Joe Queenan accuses his generation of navel-gazing and premature nostalgia.  He cites Carol King’s “So Far Away” as being the beginning of the Boomers’ descent into soppy, untimely ennui.  To be sure, 1971 was too soon for this generation to be so goddamn depressed about the loss of time, considering the average Boomer was around 20-30.  Yeah, Queenan’s making a bit of hasty generalization, but for the sake of argument let’s accept his point.  If we do, we can easily see how, though not unlike other self-absorbed generations, Boomers tend to mythologize their heyday, perhaps driven to do so after the utopian dreams of the late 60s gave way to the disillusionment of the 70s and the crass materialism of the 1980s. 

Most of the Boomers I know— hi, family!—tend to agree that the music and culture of their generation represents the pinnacle of human achievement, which always makes me want to smother those aging pricks in the bubbling tar of punk rock.  This boomer insistence that their version of rock and roll is the greatest thing ever, that Woodstock was the event, man, and the agonizing claim that they ended a war (sure took them long enough) via smoking weed and sitting in the dirt playing bongos has always made me roll my eyes.  Which is why I approached Jim McGarrah’s book Misdemeanor Outlaw with a bit of trepidation.  Do I really want to read 180-pages of Boomer self-aggrandizement? I asked myself.  Turns out I was wrong about the book, though not 100% wrong about Boomers.
 

Available here!

(Side note: All writers are self-aggrandizing.  I aspire to be part of the club; I wrote a memoir and asked people to read it; I write poems and get them published in corners of the internet and then ask people to peek into those corners.  I am as self-aggrandizing as the next damaged bastard.  Even those of my generation with the good sense to try their hand at pursuits other than writing are myopic and sentimental.  So yes, we Generation Xers, and certainly the much-maligned Millennials, are equally guilty of the above accusations leveled at Boomers.  And while we’re at it, so are the members of the so-called Greatest Generation.  We’re all human; we’re all flawed and beautiful.  We all suck.) 

But here’s the thing about Misdemeanor Outlaw: it’s a book by a Boomer, not a Boomer book.  Meaning it’s not overly sentimental; it’s not the equivalent of one of those goddamn Facebook memes with a photo of a 45 record adapter and the request to “Like and share if you ever used one of these!”  It’s a damn fine collection of loosely connected essays that jump through time in a mostly linear manner, forming a meditation on the author’s inability to find his place among rules and authority figures.  Along the way, he makes and loses friends, gets married and divorced, picks up a social disease, faces the horror of combat in Vietnam, swallows an apothecary worth of dope, and even tries his hand at the post office (which I, a former mail sorter, was delighted to read about).

The epilogue does, as expected, contain a sort of case for the 1980s—a decade I tend to romanticize—being the example of how corporate culture corrupts true art and beauty, evidenced by the rise of pop songs like “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” a nauseating tune, indeed, though the boomers would have us believe that their generations’ musicians never recorded anything as soulless and vile.  One need only recall the Ohio Express’s “Yummy Yummy Yummy” to debunk that claim. 

Aside from that one paragraph, I was far more engaged, amused, and compelled by Misdemeanor Outlaw than I expected to be.  I was familiar with McGarrah’s work.  (We share the same publisher, which, were we musicians, would make us label-mates; not sure what we are. . . Blue Herons of a feather? A Flock of Herons? Being close to “A Flock of Seagulls,” a 1980s band I assume McGarrah dislikes, I’ll go with that one.)  He is a writer who seeks to recollect things with less tranquility than honesty.  When McGarrah writes of his childhood, he eases up on the idolization of the all-American small town and presents not so much a Norman Rockwell Eden as a confining place of mores and customs that, even as a wee lad, he’s inclined to challenge.  Soon he’s dropping out of college to enlist in the Marines, a decision that sends him to Vietnam, then to a crisis of identity.  Rejecting the scare tactics and justifications of politicians, McGarrah actively opposes the war, grows his hair and embraces the hippie idealism that engulfed his generation the way Techno-solutionism is currently seducing Millennials.  When the limits of commune life are reached, McGarrah seems at his most unmoored.  Plagued by survivor guilt from Vietnam, unable to comfortably fit back into his hometown, and beset by uniformed men seeking to get over on him regardless of the length of his hair and manner of dress, our hero is the true representation of a man without a country, an outlaw, albeit of the misdemeanor variety. 

It would be remiss not to remark on the quality of McGarrah’s humorous, unflinching prose.  I laughed often while reading these pages, though the most impacting moments are the honest appraisals of the injustice done to the young men of his generation and the “true cost of these foreign policy adventures urged on by corrupt politicians and controlled by corporate interest.”  Recalling his stint in Vietnam, McGarrah writes, “On quiet nights, when the dead visit, I greet them with respect and we talk.  They speak of the loneliness of their fate and I speak in awe of mine.”  Though I know the man is writing of a time and place I can never understand, he may as well be discussing what it means to write a book.  Or, for that matter, to read one—we are seeking to converse with the dead, to compare our fates to theirs, to measure our struggle against theirs, to see what insights we can glean.  The result, in Misdemeanor Outlaw, is a book for anyone interested in walking in the shoes of a man on an absurd road toward self-actualization, though not in the trendy way Boomers sought to do as they went from well-meaning young idiots to 1980s sell-outs looking to reclaim their idealistic past.  McGarrah is too raw for that sort of thing.  His self-examination is his own, but in offering it to us, we’re privy to insights and anecdotes that are surprisingly familiar to anyone who’s ever felt mystified at the conventions the rest of the world is all too happy to obey. 

LIKE A DOG by VINCENT FRANCONE available here!

 

Read the incredible buzz for #BHBW author @jmcgarra MISDEMEANOR OUTLAW #vietnamvet

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An Impactful, Wise, and Lively Memoir

Jim McGarrah is a master storyteller, and his latest, "Misdemeanor Outlaw" is no exception. With a traveler's casual warmth, he invites the reader into his coming-of-age in the 50s with humor, illumination, and a good dose of self-deprecation. From Midwest small town America, that age of innocence takes a sharp turn as we are led to Vietnam, the young boy still so young and yet a Marine fighting an endless war. McGarrah is a savvy truthteller, but also a philosopher, and his steady reflection and interrogation of this time and its impact keep circling the larger questions whose answers we should never stop seeking. This book is full of life--it sings with it--the arc and folds that follow one's early entrance into manhood and all the ways one can be led forward, seeking, breaking, putting oneself back together again.

Misdemeanor Outlaw: A Confession of Life

Jim McGarrah was born into the halcyon bubble of post-World War Two small town America, a bubble burst by the trauma of the Vietnam War in which he fought as a marine. His recall of his youth in Princeton, Indiana will take you through the looking glass of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover. His recall of a nighttime patrol in the MeKong Delta rice paddies will make your hair stand on end and bring you to tears. Misdemeanor Outlaw is a split personality of a memoir: part anecdotal paean to a seeming Paradise Lost, part wised-up epiphany about how things really work. It is a read you will come away from questioning even what you are most fond of.

CONNECT WITH JIM ON FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/JimMcGarrah.author/

What #value does #music have in the Outlaw Life? @jmcgarra

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The music of the sixties, especially protest music, has ruined all other rock music for me. The era was a time of innovation unlike any other in rock & roll history and I was an impressionable teenager then, overwhelmed by the unique and powerful sounds. It was as if gods tied lightning bolts together and wrestled them apart through thunderous clouds. It was the magic of coming alive once and for always. So much so that everything I hear now seems derivative, either language-wise, thematically, or melody-wise. The only other time in music that I can compare it to as a touchstone is the bebop jazz era that preceded it by a decade or so. Interestingly, both groups of musicians working in both genres rose to fame considered as outlaws in the music world by their contemporaries. It was almost impossible to hear the music on or in conventional venues during their perspective eras.

Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Carlos Santana, John Mayhall, Roger McGuin, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakefield, Leslie West, Keith Richards, Duane Allman, Johnny and Edgar Winters, not to mention the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were doing things with guitars and keyboards and the new synthisizers that the great jazz innovators of the fifties had attempted with horns and pianos (i.e. Coltrane, Monk, Davis, Parker, Mingus, etc.). I still listen to the unprecedented and iconic riffs, finding something I missed every time. It’s almost like reading great poetry over and over again. The same thing is true of Dylan’s imagistic lyrics and the vocal harmonies of the Beatles and Crosby, Still, & Nash.

Along with that is the emotional resonance created by some of the great songs. I can hear the opening notes of Street Fighting Man, Master of War, Eight Miles High, Fortunate Son, or a dozen other songs and be transported instantaneously to a march or a sit in where I was making some anti-war speech and the crowd was roaring. At a time when sex was as casual as shaking hands—just a way to say hello—I can hear Guinevere or Suite Judy Blue Eyes, Girl from the North Country, Spanish Harlem Incident, A Case of You, and be making love to Mary O'Donnell on a blanket at Bear Creek in upstate New York, or Black Magic Woman and be slipping off Roceria’s black lace panties in Mazalan, Mexico. I can hear Strawberry Fields Forever and suddenly be coming down off my first acid trip at 3am over a plate of half-cooked scrambled eggs in a booth at the Big O all-night diner in Owensboro, Kentucky. I can’t listen to Reflections by the Supremes or Paint It Black by the Stones or Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf without finding my way through a maze of jungle somewhere near the DMZ in Vietnam. I can’t hear Whipping Post without remembering Cathy leaving me over for a mediocre musician who had an unlimited supply of good dope and forgiving her because I might have done the same thing.

The very fact that this music was interwoven with the social and cultural revolution that was my history, the time in my life when I worked hardest at finding my own identity, makes it iconic to me. Unlike classical music, or jazz, when I hear this music I remember who I am and why I am and how I got to be this person I am, a Misdemeanor Oulaw. And as I approach my seventh decade of life I’m finally getting to the point that I like who I am…consequently, I will continue to despise Clear Channel radio and the banal imitators that pollute the airwaves pretending the noise they make is somehow original. I’ll climb into my time machine constructed from vinyl and fueled with Rye whiskey (my doctor lets me have one drink every now and then). Once settled behind the wheel, Van Morrison and I may travel Into the Mystic or maybe I’ll Take the Highway with the Marshall Tucker Band. Regardless, my journey will be as free and joyful as it was forty years ago. I guess that’s why they call this music “classic.” And, why I write so often about that time with respect.

Jim McGarrah's poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary magazines over the past decade. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of four books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down (2003), When the Stars Go Dark (2009), Breakfast at Denny's (2013), and The Truth About Mangoes (2016), a critically acclaimed memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace that won the 2010 Legacy Nonfiction Award from the Eric Hoffer Foundation and the sequel entitled The End of an Era. His nonfiction books, Off Track and Misdemeanor Outlaw, were published by Blue Heron Book Works of Allentown, PA. Jim is also co-editor of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and a founding editor of RopeWalk Press, as well as the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review.