Going Solo: A Memoir: 1953–1958

by William Minor

At age seventeen, a boy graduates from high school and is admitted to the University of Michigan. There, both within but mostly outside the classroom, he makes troublesome discoveries about human nature, initiating a religious conversion. Challenged by Rilke’s statement “You must change your life,” he decides he must—but how cast off friends and family with whom he is all too familiar? At nineteen, he takes off on his own for New York City, attending an art school, Pratt Institute, and begins the dream of spending one’s lifetime as an artist. The year is 1955; he is exposed to the rich bond between jazz musicians (he plays jazz piano himself at the 456 Club in Brooklyn) and Abstract Expressionists. He befriends the most kindhearted, hospitable family he has ever known. A bright young woman introduces him to poets from Hart Crane to Baudelaire— and genuine love. Overwhelmed by too much “information” and insight (acquired too fast, too soon), he decides to take off with a fellow student for “the territory ahead” (one year before Jack Kerouac published On the Road): a cross-country hitchhiking adventure which, solely by chance (an injury working as a dishwasher at Big Jack’s Drive-in in Santa Monica, California) will lead him back to his hometown in Michigan—and reunion with a childhood love and a marital sojourn in the Garden of Eden (the island of Kauai in 1957). The couple, and a child, will return to San Francisco at the height of the Beat movement--and create a life together that will last for sixty years. It’s a nonfiction tale that spans significant cultural eras in American life, focused on the important discovery that you can be free only in a life you choose yourself. The book should appeal to a wide audience (anyone who’s experienced meaningful“coming of age,” which should be everyone!), a story told with considerable humor (in the spirit of Mark Twain) and lucid meaningful prose.

438 pages, Paperback

Published June 2, 2017

About the author

William Minor was originally trained as a visual artist (Pratt Institute and U.C.-Berkeley), and exhibited woodcut prints and paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and other museums and galleries. His woodcut prints incorporated the text of Russian, Modern Greek, and Japanese poetry--which he also translated.

He began to write poetry as a graduate student in Language Arts at San Francisco State, producing his first book, Pacific Grove, in 1974. Bill has, since that time, published five more books of poetry: For Women Missing or Dead, Goat Pan, Natural Counterpoint (with Paul Oehler), Poet Santa Cruz: Number 4, and Some Grand Dust (Chatoyant Press), for which he was a finalist for the Benjamin Franklin Award. His short fiction has been selected for inclusion in Best Little Magazine Fiction (NYU Press) and The Colorado Quarterly Centennial Edition.

A jazz writer with over 150 articles to his credit, Bill has also published three books on music: Unzipped Souls: A Jazz Journey Through the Soviet Union (Temple University Press), Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years (Angel City Press; Bill served as scriptwriter for the Warner Bros. film documentary based on the latter, same title as book), and Jazz Journeys to Japan: The Heart Within (University of Michigan Press.

A professional musician since the age of sixteen, Bill set poems from For Women Missing or Dead to music and recorded a CD--Bill Minor & Friends (on which he plays piano and sings). A second CD, Mortality Suite, offers original poems and music. Bill was also commissioned by the Historic Sandusky Foundation to write a suite of original music and voice script based on a married couple’s exchange of letters throughout the Civil War: Love Letters of Lynchburg.

More biographical information and links are available at www.bminor.org.