moonbridgebooks

We’re back with Michael Sieleman, author of Hippie from Iowa, the laugh-out-loud, irreverent story of his early life and hitchhiking travels across Europe in the early ’70s as a 19-year-old. It is currently 92 degrees, feels like 98, here in St. Louis, so we’re not going to sit out on the porch with Michael as he continues to shoot the breeze with us on the writing of his book. But you’re welcome to drink your beer (or lemonade).

You have a great talent for telling funny stories – and you have an amazing lot of them! Do you have some sort of karma that attracts these odd situations?

You have a great talent for asking funny questions. Karma? Maybe, but if so I must have been a real bastard in my past life. This life does seem to be one long adventure of odd situations, but they’ve been as tragic as they have been comic. I bristle a bit when Hippie from Iowa is referred to as a memoir, because though the experiences are all true, I selected primarily the comic as the backbone of the book. And, of course, it’s told from my perspective with a definite purpose. With this kind of bias, this really makes it a story–one that just happens to be comprised of true events. If I were to write a memoir, it would probably be called something like Normal Guy in a Bi-Polar Life, and it would be a terrible bore.

Were you born with this ability and are you a funny guy in your everyday conversations?

I think I did inherit an ability to be funny in my everyday conversations from my father, but I’m also very serious about life and view it differently than most people. This means I can be funny and intense almost simultaneously, sometimes to the confusion of even my best friends. Life is a serious business, but one does need to lighten up, have some fun, take a cosmic breath, and then look again to gain a more equitable perspective.

Can you tell us the process you went through to figure out how to write this memoir? Overall it follows a chronological path, but it does bounce back and forth from one time period to another. You also talk directly to your readers in a chatty manner, which is an unusual, and hence brave, tactic.

Memoir? Memoir! Damn you, it’s a STORY! However, I’ll forgive you since you make up for it by saying my chatty manner is a brave tactic. Yet, while I appreciate your compliment, it’s undeserved. It was not a preconceived tactic at all. As I said earlier, I write by the seat of the pants. I literally sat down to the computer to write the book with an idea of the voice, events, and the end to which they were directed—vaguely. I had no idea what the first sentence was going to be, but what came out was: “The substance of this writing is, I swear, all true, but I’ll warn you right now, dear reader, this thing will meander and digress all over the place. Therein, I hope, will lay it’s charm.” There was no process, no decisions on how things were to be played out, no tactics to be followed. I had a rough idea of a story and I started writing. I look back on it now and am amazed at how clearly the first sentence and the first paragraph do in fact capture the essence of the story that came to be, because I had no idea how the story would really turn out. As I write, I do pay attention to where the story is going. I did see that I was speaking directly to the reader, and bouncing around on a timeline. I let those things develop while trying to steer them in a coherent way. I don’t understand how art works, but art is not a science. You have to let it develop. If you can write, remain true to the story as it unfolds, love your narrator, your characters and your readers, you have a chance of having a hand at helping create honest art. How it works is beyond my understanding.

In the book you include bits on how you write. Now that your book has been published, do you have any advice for newbie authors?

This is a very hard question for me to answer, because I’ve spent a lifetime of dodging advice on how to write. I guess you have to figure out what kind of writer you want to be and what you want to accomplish with your writing. If you want to be a genre writer and sell a lot of books, then my advice is to read your genre of books incessantly, take writing classes, try to absorb as much as possible from those that have gone before you, look at what’s selling, and take the advice of people who are successful in your chosen genre. With luck, maybe you’ll sell some books. If you’re out to write literature/art, I have no advice to give you. By definition, you’re out to be creative, and that can’t be taught. You’ll have to find your own road (or fall into it) just like Dostoyevsky, Harper Lee, or Faulkner did. To succeed, you’ll need an endurable work ethic, nearly unbearable patience, and extraordinary luck. You’ll need to do this accepting the fact that you will most likely not succeed, and that means not pinning your identity to success. Do what you can, and hope lightning strikes.

Thank you, Michael, you’ve been great fun to talk to, and it was a lot of fun to read your story. Best wishes on the success of your book. Anyone wishing to know more about Michael can visit his website at Guardian Stone Publishing. You can also read my complete review of Hippie from Iowaby clicking on the Amazon book link in this post.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com

I had the pleasure of reading a funny life writing by Michael Sieleman entitled Hippie from Iowa. He doesn’t like me to call it a memoir (even though it is one), and it really is more than just memories of his early life and travels, encompassing his philosophies on life, religion, politics, race, and, well, you name it. He does warn readers: “this thing will meander and digress all over the place,” and it does! But all his chapters wrap up nicely. Michael writes with a warm charm as though he is sitting on the porch with you on a summer afternoon shooting the breeze, and you will fall off your chair laughing.

Hippie in Iowa begins with a lot of coming-of-age stories, which means s-e-x (nothing graphic) and a fair amount of teen boy swearing. Michael is a smart, thoughtful guy so we find a lot of musing (digressing) about various hot topics and injustices. I love this: “I’m sure right now many readers have their hackles up… but don’t get all riled up. Not yet, there’s more.” The hitch-hiking across Europe, mostly alone at the age of 18, in the year about 1973, gives a real feel for the road and hostel life. Along the way he has the craziest adventures, including encounters with a giant Welshman, a murderous Jenny, a too-friendly little German man, and American tourists wanting to take a photo of an American hippie in Europe (hippie meaning long-haired man with dirty jeans). Then there’s the Stonehenge experience.

I’m pleased to post a short interview here with Michael. Well, short on my part. Since most people, including me, have online attention spans of about 30 seconds max, I will post this in two parts…

You wrote this book many years after your journey and have detailed memories. Did you keep a journal of your travels? What made you decide to write down your experiences and how long did it take to finish writing?

The Europe trip had and has had an enormous impact on my life, coming as it did when I was eighteen years old and just after high school. Growing up in a very secure society in the Midwest to incredibly wonderful parents, I had a pretty clear life ahead of me, and did not have the angst and chaos of most teenagers going through high school. (I saved it instead for the rest of my life.) As long as I can recall, everyone told me I should be a lawyer. I could out argue nearly anyone, and would ask why about everything, going down one layer after another until I’d just wear people down or there were no longer any viable questions or answers. I didn’t intend to be this way; it was just the way I was born. My parents called me “the little why guy.” Besides, nobody seemed to have satisfactory answers to the truisms they threw out. At the age of five, I’d have conversations like:

Mom: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too!”

Me: “Why not?”

Mom: “Because if you eat your cake, it’s gone, and you don’t have it anymore.”

Me: “That’s different. Saying you’re cake is gone after you eat it is not the same as saying you can’t have it and then eat it.”

Mom: “You know what I mean.”

Me: “No, I don’t. They’re two different things, and what you’re saying isn’t true.”

Mom: “Of course it is. Everybody knows that.”

Me: “Look, every year you make me a birthday cake, I have it, and then I eat it. Right? So, I have my cake and I eat it too. Besides, what good would it be anyway if you had a cake and you couldn’t eat it?”

Mom would throw her hands up and walk away in despair.

(It wouldn’t be until I was thirty years old that I’d read in an old book, “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.” Finally, a logical statement: everyone just had always said it backwards, or perhaps more appropriately put for this unique case, backwords. It was about the same time I also read, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world.” I’d always heard, “It’s a doggy dog world,” and that made no sense to me when juxtaposed against the context in which it was used. It also clashed against the phrase, “It’s a dog’s life.” Thirty was a good year: I got two things cleared up.)

That’s how my life went, up until I went to Europe. I was very rational about things, and “the law” seemed to be my future. When the proposal to hitch Europe was presented to me and I got over the initial stun, I seemed to intuit (finally) that I needed to just experience the journey without analyzing, cataloging, or even keeping a journal. I didn’t even take a camera, because I didn’t want to miss what I was looking at while trying to capture it on film. I figured if things were important enough, I would remember them.

So, no journal. Was that a long enough answer?

Well, that was a round about answer! (Which reminds me of how I love the roundabouts in Europe – tip: don’t try to hitch a ride within a roundabout.) You wrote this book many years after your journey and have detailed memories. What made you decide to write down your experiences and how long did it take to finish writing?

In my first year of college after getting back from Europe, I decided no law school for me—I was going to be a writer. I was and am a serious writer, having written the first novel of a trilogy at the age of twenty-seven about the Russian Revolution, after years of research. (War and Peace, of course, was just too brief.) Though the novel had a great plotline and characters, it read as dead as dead, and recognizing this I abandoned the book. Never again would I research something to death, and I would learn to write in my own voice. I set in for the long haul. I wrote for years (decades, actually) without trying to be published, but it 2005 I finished the first draft of a very good novel. Unfortunately, it needed a ton of work, and being broke, I needed to go back to work. By 2008, I was fired from a job because I didn’t fit in with the good old boy managers. However, I was well like by my coworkers and realized on the day after I was fired I’d never gotten a chance to tell them the bizarre story of my night alone at Stonehenge. I figured just for the hell of it, I’d write it as a short story and send it off to them. As I thought about how to present it, memories and the suggestion of friends who loved my stories and said I should write a book about them came flooding back. I’d always told my friends while I could tell a funny story, I had no idea how to write humor. As I thought about Stonehenge and other stories, things began to take shape, and by the end of the afternoon, the title “Hippie from Iowa” hit me and everything congealed. I was off the next day, writing—as I had learned over the years—by the seat of my pants.

I had concerns in the early going, wondering how long I could sustain the crazy energy level that it seemed to contain (and how long it would remain fresh with the reader), but it evolved in directions I never anticipated. I got out of the way and let it happen. I finished the first draft in four months, writing five to eight hours a day, five days a week. When you write by the seat of your pants, you find when you are at the end that there are a lot of false starts that don’t belong in the “story” that has evolved. So, you start cutting, sometimes vast tracts, even before you rewrite. The cutting and two more drafts took another three months. I then wasted my time for the next four months trying to get an agent before realizing the book was too different to be picked up, and nobody is interested in unpublished writers unless you are a celebrity. So, off to the world of indie publishing: six months of setting up the business, website, cover design, ISBNs, LCCNs, copyright, et al, along with five more major drafts and innumerable proofs. From the time my fingers first hit the keyboard until the book was printed took about eighteen months of fulltime work. Now I’m marketing … oh joy.

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Stay tuned for Part II this Sunday. It’s going to be very hot here in the Midwest. Bring a beer.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com