The Jack Kerouac Project
| October 12th, 2008
(photo by C-Monster)
Bob Kealing, the frigging madman behind the The Kerouac Project of Orlando, doesn’t want you to write like Kerouac. Four times a year, the program that he helped create brings one writer-in-residence into Kerouac’s former home in Florida to work, to write, to create and be influenced by the long-dead old soul of Jack Kerouac’s writing genius.
In a recently aggregated column, Sarah Larimer, who writes for the Associated Press, explained a rather interesting thing in this paragraph of near obsolescent clarity:
Now his old digs house the Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence Project, which brings emerging authors to live and work in the home for three-month stints — not to create Kerouac clones, but to give them the opportunity to develop their own style. [Ed. note: emphasis added by me.]
This is truly a great idea. The only downside is that these budding writers sound like they spend too much time explaining the situation: that they aren’t trying to emulate Kerouac, just living in his old house and doing the same thing that he did. On the flip-side, though, people seem to have the unreal expectation that a proximity to historical magnificence automatically means that that same magnificence will be recreated. Tsk! Tsk!
