‘9/11’” Facing Our Fascist State & What A Plot! -- inscribed to Chuck Kinder & Diane Cecily
San Francisco: Irresistible/Revolutionary at Hart’s Spring Works, 2002. First Edition. Wraps. Trade softcover, very good. Inscribed, “For Chuck and Diane, long-time nourishment —and a lot more fun than bran and oats! Don, 1/7/03.” Paul is a poet, essayist and social activist. He was the youngest recipient ever of a Stegner Fellowship, in 1971, and soon met Kinder when he got to Palo Alto. In an online review that Paul posted of a volume of Kinder’s poetry, he wrote of Kinder, “Chuck is a dear and longtime friend. We met at Stanford in 1971 when we both were Fellows in the Creative Writing Program there. We were among a nuclei close and nurturing. We shared more drunken times than anyone can count, gazing at cowboy-hatted used-car salesmen on kitchen-table TVs, wondering at artist dancers on —Soul Train—, contemplating Constellations where and when the Matadero becomes Manhattoes, Such was our bond, then, that Chuck cracked three ribs against the dashboard of a Mercedes Benz ambulance while riding with me in flight and later helped with the alibi.” Another author from that time and locale, Tom Zigal, writing about meeting James Crumley, noted “We had met at Chuck Kinder’s moveable feast of drunken writers in San Francisco in the mid-’70s and had become good friends. Chuck and his wife, Diane Cecily, were famous for their literary salon. On any given evening you could find amazing people gabbing around their kitchen table: Ray Carver and his wife, Maryann, Max Crawford, Bill Kittredge, Michael Rogers, Don Paul, the underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson, and Crumley, whenever he drove down from Missoula. It always felt like the ’60s at Chuck and Diane’s.” The events of 9/11/01 seemed to have turned Paul into a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and several of his publications are his thoughts on what really happened that day. From the library of Chuck Kinder (1946-2019) and Diane Cecily. Kinder, a native of West Virginia, was a legendary creative writing professor at Pitt, famous for having been Raymond Carver’s dear friend in the 1970s-80s (“my best friend, drinking companion and fellow outlaw”) and for inspiring Michael Chabon, whose character Grady Tripp in “Wonder Boys” is Chabon’s loving tribute to his old mentor. As a Stegner Fellow at Stanford in 1972, Kinder became close friends with Scott Turow, Richard Price, Max Crawford, William Kittredge, and Carver, and later Richard Ford, Gurney Norman, Ed McClanahan, Tess Gallagher, Tobias Wolff, and S. Clay Wilson. His wife, Diane Cecily (1942-2026) was Raymond Carver’s love interest in the early 1970s, and was well acquainted with the Missoula bunch that Kinder had become involved with. They married in 1975 and when Kinder took a job at Pitt in 1980, their home quickly became the heart of the local literary scene. The two were known for their nurturing generosity, storytelling, loyalty and hospitality, and they were great believers in the supportive power of literary communities. Very good. Item #h45085
Price: $25.00