Wild Summers: new teen classic novel

 I posted this on Goodreads today. Attention librarians, book sellers, teen readers, adult readers, teachers, book reviewers

Christopher Faiers's Reviews > Wild Summers

Wild Summers
by

Cassie Steward (Goodreads Author)

Christopher Faiers's review

Aug 29, 2026  ·  edit

it was amazing

I have a personal interest in Cassie's latest novel Wild Summers, as she based a lot of it on my memoir Eel Pie Island Dharma. It's impressive how vividly her imagination recreates that heady time in the summer of 1969 when the world was undergoing the cultural upheaval of Beatlemania and hippiedom.

Her main character, seventeen year old Joan Summers, is experiencing a boring summer break as a disaffected upper middle class teen in Twickenham. Then the heady ferment of the sixties moves next door in the person of a rising young rock star. Her older sister is the cool one who attracts his attention, while nerdy Joan remains in her sister's shadow. A visit across the footbridge to mythical Eel Pie Island and the inhabitants of its abandoned hotel's hippie squatters cause a change in Joan's perspective. The unexpected acceptance of the bohemian gaggle of young people living in the ruined hotel causes Joan's life to change in directions she has never imagined.

This is the second novel acknowledging the influence of my memoir. The first was by the very established writer Hari Kunzru. His second novel, My Revolutions, also used the atmospheric and cultural turmoil described in EPID. Hari has gone on to establish himself on the A list of British authors, and it is my belief that Cassie Steward's book is at least the equal of his novel. I find her characterizations more believable and fully rounded out than Kunzru's, and her plotting more interesting and credible. Not to knock Hari whose literary credentials are secure, but to show how accomplished Cassie Steward's writing is.

In Canada where I worked as a librarian, Wild Summers would be classified as a Young Adult (YA) book. I believe it is one of the more important books in the YA canon, perhaps the equivalent of teen classics like The Outsiders or The Catcher in the Rye. I believe Wild Summers will help Cassie achieve the sales to also establish her as a financially successful writer. But I also believe Wild Summers has the potential to become a teen classic. Reviewers, librarians and book shop owners
pay attention to this brilliant and absorbing novel. Written with young people in mind, adults who remember their teen angst will enjoy this as much or more than their kids and grand kids. Harry Potter and Stephen King teen territory is being invaded!

New book Wild Summers based on Eel Pie Island Dharma

 I'm chuffed as we said in the hippie days when I lived in the abandoned hotel on Eel Pie Island. British author Cassie Steward has just published a 500 page novel largely based on the experiences and freeform lifestyle of the residents of the hotel.

 My Eel Pie Island Dharma is less than a fifth the length of Cassie's novel. It's a haibun/memoir, and my original intentions were to use the brief chapters as guidelines for a novel. But I came to feel the text worked perfectly as a haibun, and self published it that way in 1990. In 2012 Tai Grove published a far more professional edition with Hidden Brook Press.

I love it that EPID has now been used as the basis of Wild Summers, her fully fleshed out novel. Her main character is a 17 year old girl living in the poshest area of Twickenham. It's a great coming age novel with social outcast Joan Summers discovering herself through visits and friendships with the bohemian inhabitants of the hotel. 

                          This is Cassie standing in the entrance to the Eel Pie Island Museum.

Here's the cover of her book against the backdrop of the current Eel Pie Island footbridge.

from Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the real Eel Pie Island posse, old and new: Chris Faiers,

 haiku poet and author of Eel Pie Island Dharma. You and your book were

 so integral to my research. You've been so generous with your time and so

 supportive of this project. You feel like a faraway friend and I smile every 

time your name appears in my e-mail box. The same to Weed, (the real Weed), 

who also let me use his name for one of my characters (I hope you like him!).

To read for free the original 1990 text of Eel Pie Island Dharma click on the link at the top right hand side of this blog under links of interest: Eel Pie Dharma. It's basically the same as the text of the Hidden Brook Press pubication, minus the crucial intro and picture sections.

Eel Pie Island Remembered and Reimagined: India Birgitta Jarvis/feature in The Londoner

 

Congratulations Chris,

Your book  "Eel Pie Island Dharma" has become a classic. It is right here beside me in my research office at the campus.

So, Let’s dance here, https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/16550272

Yes, definitely do NOT forget the haiku audience, we are in the millions;-) On that note, looking forward to your next haiku to be selected for David McMurray’s newspaper column, the Asahi Haikuist. 

David McMurray: Editor Asahi Haikuist Network

                                                                      ~.  ~.  ~.  ~

British author Cassie Steward is using my haiku as an epigraph to her new book, Wild Summers. It’s about the Eel Pie era in London and features the Eel Pie Island Commune as a major location.

I also have another ask - you know how some books have a little quote/poem in the opening pages, before the novel begins? I was wondering if I could use a few lines of one of your poems? It would be fully credited with your name/etc. Just to capture the vibe of the book before it starts. I found these two, but perhaps you have another you think would be more fitting?

After cold midnight
    scraping burnt commune rice pot
        on the lawn for birds

 

Beside the Thames
    giant teepee
        spilling hippies

The UK’s largest hippy commune was on an island in the Thames It hosted David Bowie, orgy rooms and 'Fuckbucket Flo'. So how did we lose the Eel Pie Hotel? By India Birgitta Jarvis • 16 May 2026  View in browser Image via Flickr / Messy Nessy

Our Saturday stories are free for all to read — but we can only survive with your help (and we're currently being sued for £250,000 by a wealthy Airbnb grifter). If you're a fan of today's piece, please do consider becoming a paying member. And with our spring discount, it costs less than a fiver a month (for your first three months) to support us. Support local journalism in the capital In the late 1960s, Chris Faiers was down and out in London. Canadian by birth, he’d grown up in North America and emigrated, like so many other young men, to dodge the Vietnam draft, after having received three notices in a week. When he walked into the offices of a local newspaper in Richmond to ask for a job, he was surprised when he was taken seriously – the editor gave him a test assignment, telling him about some hippies who had started a commune in an abandoned hotel in Twickenham. The hotel was on a little island in the middle of the Thames. He caught the bus to Twickenham and found the footbridge which led to the island. “It was about two hundred feet across the little bridge, with a beautiful view of the Thames,” he writes in his haiku-laden, LSD-infused memoir, Eel Pie Dharma. “When I had reached the island I felt I had entered a special place. A footpath lined with neat little cottages wound through the centre of the island. There was no missing the old hotel at the end of the footpath. It was derelict, and I just walked in where the grand front entrance had once been.” Faiers is right about the view. There’s something almost Scandinavian about it, from where Eel Pie Island connects to the Thames embankment at Twickenham via a humped iron bridge: thickets of dense greenery dapple the light over little corrugated iron houses, converted from boat stores, which hug the water’s edge. Some dwellings have their own jetties, all have pleasant garden seating areas and are a picture of idyllic outdoor living. I’ve come to this island, not quite nine acres in total and situated in an affluent, westerly stretch of river, because it is currently the subject of a painting exhibition by an artist called Nick Goss – or, at least, a version of it is – and I want to find out more about the real thing. Goss’s show, currently on at Fitzrovia’s Josh Lilley Gallery, takes the fabled Eel Pie Hotel as its starting point. That is, the site of the commune which, before it fell to the long-hairs, had been both a glamorous Victorian leisure resort and a hip music venue where future stars of Swinging London cut their teeth. A bend in the river by Nick Goss. (Image: Josh Lilley Gallery / Sutton Comms) Anglo-Dutch painter Nick Goss habitually distorts a sense of place through his multi-disciplinary practice – oil washes layered with fragmented silk screen patterning lend a gauziness to otherwise recognisable landscapes or interiors. In this new exhibition, Eel Pie is warped by his brush, and rooted less in reality than in an imagined hybrid of all its incarnations throughout time. Across eleven paintings, the hotel is shown partially obscured by foliage from across the opposite towpath, or through its interior corridors where a blurred mass of revellers are whirling and jiving between numbered rooms. You’re never quite certain what version of hotel life you’re gazing at. Rendered in this manner, Nick’s island is enigmatic, inaccessible, unknowable. Considering that the hotel has long since disappeared, and that the island is totally under private ownership today, this is basically true. Want to hear more of the city's hidden history and ignored stories? We take pride in going behind the scenes to get the real story, even if it takes weeks of work, so we can give this city some real, dedicated journalism. From months-long investigations to chaotic dispatches and untold stories of the capital’s history, we’ve got you covered. We're grateful for whatever you can spare, but an annual subscription ensures allows our small team to produce even bigger and more ambitious stories. And as a gesture of thanks, if you take out a year’s membership of The Londoner, we’ll give you two months completely free. What's more, you'll get access to our entire back catalogue of members-only journalism, receive eight extra editions per month, and be able to come along to our fantastic members' events. I'm backing The Londoner Welcome to Eel Pie Island Now the stuff of legend, the Eel Pie Hotel was many things in its lifetime, but in every iteration there seems to have been dancing. Miss Morleena Kenwigs in Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1839) heads “unto the Eel-pie Island at Twickenham” nine years after the hotel was first built, “to make merry upon a cold collation, bottled beer, shrub, and shrimps, and to dance in the open air to the music of a locomotive band”. Nineteenth-century illustrations and photographs of the hotel’s facade show a symmetrical building with jutting dormer windows and a pretty covered terrace on the second floor.  A postcard from 1900 of the Eel Pie Hotel in its prime (Image: Wikimedia Commons) As the soundtrack changed from classical to jazz, the hotel remained a backdrop to dancing. The venue was to double down on its appeal as a dancing destination in 1951, when it was purchased by a Kingston shop owner called Michael Snapper, who, along with his savvy business partner Arthur Chisnall, recognised the potential of a three-floor riverside building with a ready-made sprung dancefloor to become a uniquely positioned music venue. In doing so, he cleverly pre-empted the desires of the emerging teenager class. More common in athletic or dance venues, the sprung floor provided a bounce that made concert-viewing all the more dynamic.  It was Snapper who commissioned the bridge in 1957, increasing footfall to an island that had previously only been accessible by barge. Regular visitors to the venue’s jazz and jive nights were rewarded with an EELPILAND passport for entry, whereas the more casual attendee had their arm stamped after paying their fee. Then came the 60s, the hotel’s musical hey-day. In a piece about the venue, The Guardianquotes Michele Whitby, the curator of the museum dedicated to Eel Pie Island, in describing the island as “all boatyards” and as having “very little residential accommodation”. And this was presumably just one reason why Eel Pie became such an important musical destination: the fans “thought the police would find it more difficult to come over and they were free to make more noise,” Whitby says. The inside of an EELPILAND passport (Image via Messy Nessy) The Rolling Stones were invited to take on a five-month residency at the venue, followed at various points by gigs from the likes of Cream, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and The Who — but this era of the hotel functioning as a music venue soon came to an end. The building became a shadow of its Victorian self due to lack of investment as more money was spent on bookings than upkeep. The sprung dancefloor collapsed and the council revoked its licence in 1967. It seemed like the fun was over. Share this story  It might have been, if not for a shag-haired artist-cum-anarchist called Clifford, who came to the hotel with an easel and a dream. It was Cliff who Chris (“Canadian Chris”, as he signs his emails off) encountered on his journalistic quest, and who invited him to ditch the assignment and move on in, which he promptly did. According to Eel Pie Dharmathe other residents, who arrived in dribs and drabs, were a mix of “dossers, hippies, runaway schoolkids, drug dealers, petty thieves, heroin addicts, artists, poets, bikers, American hippie tourists, au pair girls, and Zen philosophers from all over the world”, with monikers like Fuckbucket Flo, Magic Mike and Gurdjieff Dave. Another resident, Weed, who lived in the hotel between January 1969 and August 1970, recalls the rag-tag community to me: “One of my favourite book titles is Beautiful Losers (Leonard Cohen, 1966) – of course, not all of us were beautiful, and not all of us were losers, but there were moments when some of us were lost in the beauty of it all. There are always those who search for meaning, especially in the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and that was probably as good a place as any to be while looking.” Orgy rooms, weed and a mysterious inferno Now approaching his 78th birthday, Chris’s recollections of the machinations of commune life are somewhat hazy (as a comment from Cliff on the former residents’ Facebook group puts it: “If you can remember it – then you weren’t there”), but he describes Cliff’s initial vision as akin to “an arts lab centre styled on existing arts labs in the UK,” referring to a counter-cultural movement of anti-establishment facilities for experimental artists. Shocked at the poverty that still existed in post-war London compared to the cosseted lives of his North-American peers, Chris wasn’t surprised when the bohemian vision fell apart at Eel Pie Hotel and it “quickly became more of a squat, a desperate home for the desperate disenfranchised”.  The hotel in its squatter era (Image via Messy Nessy) That’s not to say that day-to-day life was without colour. In Eel Pie Dharma he describes how “most evenings we stayed up until the wee hours smoking incredibly strong three-paper joints of tobacco and hash and sucking on hash-stuffed chillums. Sometimes there were impromptu musical jams. Many could play, or attempted to play, guitar. We would all sing, until finally we lapsed into stoned reveries”. There was a designated orgy room, and the ballroom was given a makeover with “garish psychedelic paintings all over the flaking walls”. A photo on the Facebook group, posted by someone called Wavey Gravy, shows a tie-dyed teepee pitched up in the grounds where Miss Morleena had supped on her cold collation.  Support The Londoner But without any proper infrastructure to sustain it, London’s answer to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury eventually became untenable. “The junkyard landlord had repeatedly tried to get us out, but to no avail. However, natural processes were destroying the commune both physically and spiritually. Floor boards had been ripped up [for fuel] for two winters, and the very foundations of the hotel had been weakened. Lead had been stripped off the roof and sold to metal dealers,” Chris writes. “While Eel Piers were slowly demolishing the building bit by bit, more and more wandering hippies, musicians, runaways and finally junkies and bikers moved in. Most of the original Eel Piers moved on to more secure squats in the heart of London [and] the bikers took to throwing stones through all the windows, and syringes could now be found littering the dirt-packed floors.” Chris left in 1970, and, after going back to Canada two years later, he’s only made one return visit to the UK since. The hotel – or what was left of it – burned down in 1971, while restoration work was already underway. The usual line is that it happened “under mysterious circumstances”. Share this story  Fast forward to 2026, I step off of the bridge onto terra firma and ask a fellow pedestrian if he knows which way the hotel had once been, and he obligingly points me down a footpath – which, it turns out, is the only such footpath on the island. There’s really only one direction you can walk before the path runs out and your way is blocked by the heavy red doors of the island’s boat building company, from behind which come the metallic scrapes and bangs of maritime industry. Looking again now on Google Maps, it seems that the path which bisects the islet doesn’t even cover the full length – in fact a sizeable portion of its north-east tip is hidden behind fences, concealed totally from prying eyes except for from the riverbanks of Ham and the fairy playground that is York House Gardens. It’s almost ridiculously charming, with its properties named things like Run Softly, Wild Thyme, and The Love Shack but it’s hard to shake the cynicism that comes with the knowledge that what was once the symbol of a free-spirited, hedonistic London youth quake is now prime real estate, off limits and enigmatic, just as Goss surmises through his art. There's no signs of the hotel or its fascinating past on the island today (Image: India Brigitta Jarvis) When I reach the path’s end I get chatting to Lis, a beautiful octogenarian, and resident of Eel Pie for some forty years, who shuffles toward me in Hoka trainers which she’s apparently test-driving, and a blue linen sunhat perched atop her white hair. A former singer, Lis lives in a house on the Aquarius complex, which popped up on top of the rubble of the hotel in the 1970s – a modernist affair of pale brick, “designed” as Lis puts it, “to maximise the river view”. Under normal circumstances the casual Eel Pie visitor would be unable to verify this, but Lis invites me in to see for myself what the atmosphere is like today. Enjoying today's story? Please forward this email and help us spread the word about The Londoner. The house is bright and airy, with spotless beige carpet and post-Impressionist style paintings. But it’s the garden, seen through huge windows, which Lis and I make a beeline for – the former swapping her blue linen hat for an identical one in baby-pink before we step out the back door. The lawn is tidy, punctuated by neat flower beds, and comes right to the water’s edge, where the view is of Ham’s leafy towpath and paddle boarders bobbing along the sleepy river. All traces of the site as a den of iniquity have been swept away. It’s hard to imagine someone pitching a teepee in this manicured paradise, but what strikes me most is the quiet – where Goss’s paintings and the hippie snapshots contain an almost palpable distant beat, in reality the music has well and truly stopped. There’s no escaping it. Social life on the island now is more about the yacht club’s start of season luncheon and community pot-luck suppers than racking lines with Mick Jagger. As Weed, who, unlike Chris, has returned to visit the area since 1970 tells me, “the beauty of the Island itself continues, but Twickenham is the poorer for the passing of the hotel and dancehall – they served as welcoming places for many generations”. Can you spot the wine bottle we missed? (Image: Josh Lilley Gallery / Sutton Comms) The next week, I return to Josh Lilley Gallery to take another look at Goss’s paintings. Their colour palette is tastefully muted, and they somehow achieve the near-impossible: capturing the marriage of present-day suburban domesticity with the haziness of memory the island evokes. I’m drawn to one canvas in particular: a lonely figure slumped at a long table, the suggestion of a lush garden seen through the windows behind him. The scene could be a sleek modern hotel conference room, or it could show a breakfast table in a comfortable family home, or – and now I register the single wine bottle in the picture – it could be someone in a drug-fuelled reverie seeing in the sunrise, the morning after the night before. Goss’s compositions feel particularly striking in how they capture Eel Pie Island through fragmentary glimpses rather than something more concrete. But they also serve as a reminder that memory and imagination are the only way to access a place like this, because – for better or for worse – Eel Pie Hotel and its delights could not exist today.  Nick Goss, Eel Pie Hotel, is on view till 23 May 2026 at Josh Lilley Gallery (40 – 46 Riding House Street London W1W 7EX). Share this story

My Hippie Haibun Memoir Helped Inspire Famous Novelist Hari Kunzru

 Today I received the following email from Judy Haiven, an old activist friend. She recently revisited Hari Kunzru's novel My Revolutions in a blog post, giving it high praise. Judy also reminded me that Hari Kunzru credits my memoir, Eel Pie Island Dharma, in the acknowledgments. Many thanks, Judy!

 I remember a quote from Lit Hub by another author, also a lesser known writer like myself. Wish I'd kept the quote, but its essence was that there are great writers, who are like seas and large lakes, and then there are writers who may be but small streams, but our work helps feed these larger bodies of world literature. 

  Hari read the online account of my memoir which was posted in the early 2000s by weed, another Eel Pie Island communard. Weed's posting led to the professional publication of my memoir/haibun by Hidden Brook Press in 2012. Special thanks to Weed and to HBP publisher Tai Grove!

I must've talked to you about this extremely useful and good novel by the British novelist Harry kunzru  strangely enough my son who now lives in London knows him because they're both writers I guess.  in any case, this is a book that refers to your accounts of what happened in 69 and 70 and so on in London and I highly recommend it. I recommended it in my blog again this week. Judy Haiven

Judy Haiven, PhD 
Writer/activist
Halifax NS
Canada

Hari Kunzru read an online posting of my 1990 memoir then titled Eel Pie Dharma. It was one of the earliest book length English language haibun. Many would follow in its footsteps, including myself, with a professional publication by Tai Grove with his Hidden Brook Press in 2012. Here's a pic from Amazon.

LSD nights and days with a pyramid: Glastonbury Fayre 1971

This a chapter from my haibun/memoir. Listening to CBC Radio this morning I heard a news item about this year's line-up for the Glastonbury Music Festival and started reminiscing. I first published this in 1990 as a chapter in Eel Pie Dharma: a memoir/haibun with my poetry press Unfinished Monument. Tai Grove did a much more professional reprint with his Hidden Brook Press in 2012. We changed the title to Eel Pie Island Dharma: a hippie memoir/haibun so potential readers would know it wasn't a cookbook! 

As always, special thanks to fellow Eel Pie Island communard Weed for posting this online in the early 2000s. Check out his websites.     

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers

Chapter 24 - Glastonbury Magic Festival Word went out through the hippie grapevine of a magic festival to be held in Glastonbury.  Glastonbury was a legendary sacred site in England, with a cathedral where one of the apostles had planted a rose bush which bloomed all the year round.  Nearby loomed a mysterious conical hilltop, called a tor, which was rumoured to be hollow.  Glastonbury Tor was said to be a 'sending station' on the system of ley lines, a power grid which lay over the English countryside, and which is the planet's equivalent of the magnetic fields which surround the human body which acupuncturists use. Jeremy and I had earlier visited another of these mysterious tors, Michael's Mount off the Cornish Coast.  Another such tor is Mont San Michel off the French coast.  In the olden days festivals were held to replenish the 'dragon power', or earth magic which kept fields fertile and the inhabitants prosperous.  Supposedly the twelve signs of the zodiac were laid out around Glastonbury Tor, and from the small chapel on top of the Tor one could see the zodiac's unusual shapes blended in with the English countryside. This was an event not to be missed.  The festival was to be held for the summer solstice, June 21, and I left my dossing friends in Cornwall and began to hitchhike.  I got a ride as far as Salisbury, travelling quickly through the ancient fields of Stonehenge country.  Walking through Salisbury, a hippie/student came up to me, and gave me a hit of acid wrapped in foil.  He bragged how he and his mates had put hits of acid into the milk bottles which the local police used for their tea, and how that day a couple of cops had gone to hospital with hallucinations, while the other policemen wandered about in a happy daze all day, smiling at everyone. I thanked him for the acid, and not knowing what to do with it, and not wanting to be caught with it in my possession after hearing his story, I put the foil packet in my mouth and resumed hitching.  Rides followed quickly.  First a van full of black musicians on their way to a gig picked me up, hoping to score some dope.  Then a mysterious business-type man in a sleek Jaguar told me to hop in. As we sped through the darkening evening his conversation became more and more questioning.  He seemed to know a lot about the forthcoming festival, and was eager to know as much as I could tell him about it.  I realized that I was beginning to babble, and then it occurred to me that the acid had been dissolving in my mouth, depite the tinfoil.  So I was starting to trip, and at this point, speeding through the night, my mysterious driver told me he was the police chief for the area, and that he wanted to know what to expect from the festival goers.  I tried to put his mind at ease, that we weren't going to be smuggling dope or sacrificing virgins.  I also realized that I wanted to get out of the car before a full-blown acid trip took over. He let me out on the outskirts of Piltdown, after pointing me in the general direction of the farm where the festival would be held.  I wandered down the lonely highway in the dark with only starlight to guide me.  The white lines in the middle of the road began stretching and blurring in an effect I knew was the result of a mild acid trip, but the effects weren't overpowering.  At the juncture with the road I was to follow the next day, I slipped into a field and fell asleep, exhaustion overcoming the weak acid dose. I awoke late the next morning, still feeling some effects from the acid, and lay in the field watching the clouds make incredible patterns in the clear blue sky. Finally excitement at the thought of the festival overcame my lethargy, and I started to walk down the country road.  Surprisingly I got another ride, this time from a local who also had heard a lot about the festival.  He was dubious about the quality of our hippie magic, as the weather had been overcast for the past few days.  His tone wasn't ironic, and I realized how many of the British, especially in the countryside, still believe in magic and a lot of the Celtic mythologies. The road was becoming jammed with fellow festival goers, and when my ride let me out, I joined the throng.  This was a more serious and committed type of hippie.  We were the true believers for the most part, not just students growing their hair long for a wild summer. A local farmer let us use his fields, with his stone farmhouse as headquarters.  By the time I got to the site it was dinner time, and some self-styled diggers had set up a kitchen beside the farmhouse in the barnyard.  I ate some stew dippped from a huge iron pot, and soon was reviving old friendships with people from the Richmond scene and elsewhere. There was a magical excitement in the air, and the view over the festival site was typical of Somerset's hilly beauty.  I wandered from the throng at the soup kitchen, and fell asleep on a hill in the middle of a field.  A very odd snuffling noise awoke me very early the next morning: Asleep in a field     a browsing cow         my alarm clock I was too excited, for once, to fall back asleep, and made my way down the hill to where some vans were unloading around the base of an unusual structure.  The rock'n'roll bands were going to play on a platform part way up a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, which we were going to build with construction scaffolding which an enlightened builder had loaned us. Everyone was smoking dope and unloading trucks in a flurry of manic activity, and I joined in.  I was proud of the muscles I had developed as a gravedigger, and I spent hours unloading scaffolding.  After unloading, I joined the construction crews, and very quickly the pyramid began taking shape.  One job I had to perch on a rail high in the air and saw off the end of a piece of pipe with a hacksaw.  Halfway through the job, someone handed me a carrot carved into a chillum and stuffed with pungent hash.  We were a crazy looking construction crew, but somehow through the haze of hash smoke, the pyramid grew skyward.  Boards were laid for the performance area, about twenty feet off the ground, and the scaffolding continued to a peak about seventy feet above that. After working on the pyramid all day, I took off for a tour of the festival site.  The farm was about a hundred acres, with hedgerows dividing the area into several major fields.  Tents were appearing everywhere, and many hippies were building huts in the hedgerows.  Banners and tents and colourful people were everywhere, like some medieval camp before battle. For a bunch of spaced-out freaks, things were amazingly well organized.  Six-foot deep latrines were dug, and metal pipes were laid across them.  Another free kitchen sprung up towards the bottom of the site, and everyone looked like they were going to be housed and fed.  At the bottom of the hilly fields, the pyramid stretched into the sky, and after several days of building, the musical part of the festival was about to begin. I settled in a giant wigwam tent, at the bottom of the fields about a hundred yards from the pyramid.  Quickly our tent became a family, and I met a blonde girl who hitched into Piltdown with me to buy food for our tribe.  That night about ten of us dropped acid together while we sat huddled in blankets before the stage. Arthur Brown was the first performer, and he tried to bum people out.  He sang about how the Aquarian dream was a fake, and that we should all examine our consciences.  We countered his rock star negativity by staying in our group, and whenever one of us looked a little uncomfortable, the rest of us would put our arms over them and tell them they were in a big egg and about to be reborn. The positive group dynamics soon had us all on great acid trips, and we felt free to wander as a group.  We danced and listened to the music under the stars with hundreds of other stoned worshippers, and all was at peace.  Someone had gotten hold of a jug of scrumpy, a strong local cider, and that also helped ease any acid paranoias. Later in the evening, one of us had to take a dump, and so the whole gang of us dutifully trooped over to the open air latrines, and all of us sat in a long row on the poles and had a good shit or pee, men and women, young and old.  It was one of the most liberating experiences of my life, all of us sitting there in the open air under the stars, making the natural and rude noises we all must make every day of our lives without any embarrassment.  Some of us got the giggles from the acid, and the relaxing sound of laughter mixed well with the rock music and the sounds of nature. We all stumbled into the wigwam and fell asleep in each others' arms.  I slept with the blonde girl, but we wanted to remain celibate to keep the spiritual atmosphere.  In the middle of the night there was a commotion outside, and when we went to investigate, we noticed a giant shining star.  On acid it hung in the sky like a space ship  -  it was the morning star, and we all stood in awe for several minutes. After a week of wandering in the fields, listening to music around campfires and eating with our fingers, we were incredibly dirty.  I decided to walk the mile to a little pond where there were thirty or forty skinnydippers splashing around.  I slipped off my dirty bellbottoms, and swam around in naked bliss, the water cool under the high afternoon sun. Late the next morning a hippie gave me a hit of acid, and then suggested we walk across the fields to Glastonbury Tor.  It was a long hike, and after the usual hour the acid started coming on.  It wasn't enough to overwhelm us, though.  After several miles we came to a country road with a pub, and we stood and watched the swaying patterns the wind was making by sweeping through the ivy on the walls: Wind     through ivy mat         pub walls Finally we reached the Tor, and began the slow hike up.  After twenty minutes we completed the steep climb, and there below us was laid out the Somerset countryside.  Try as I might, I couldn't make out the mythical zodiac patterns, but the old chapel on the top of the Tor had a very magical aura about it, and the view itself was enough to make any other kind of magic irrelevant. The festival had lasted over a week.  It was much written about in the British musical and countercultural press, and I believe that the festival is still being held annually, almost twenty years after our inaugural event with the great pyramid. Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.

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original Glastonbury Festival web page   |   official Glastonbury Festival web page

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comments to weed@wussu.com
revised 8 March 2017
URL http://www.eelpie.org/epd_24.htm

The Buddhist Monastery

Following is one of my favourite chapters from my memoir/haibun Eel Pie Island Dharma. It's about the fall of 1969, after I'd resisted the draft for the Vietnam War and escaped to England. It was first self-published in 1990 with Unfinished Monument Press, then professionally republished in 2012 with Hidden Brook Press (thanks publisher Tai Grove). Thanks also to fellow Eel Pie Island communard Weed who kindly posted this online circa 2003. I believe it's one of the earliest English language book length haibun.   

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers

Chapter 11 - The Buddhist Monastery Mark Valiant at first seemed an unlikely person to have a deeply religious side.  He was an ex-cop, and the story goes that as he was becoming more and more sympathetic towards the youth rebellion, one day he took the plunge, and took it in a big way.  Mark took a strong dose of STP, a psychedelic even more hallucinatory than LSD.  He tripped for three days, and after that experience he was a changed man.  He quit the police, grew a beard and took to hanging around L'Auberge Cafe. Mark was one of the regulars in Martha's crowd, sort of an older brother for Martha and a surrogate son for the Holmes.  He had been the unofficial "elder" who took charge when Martha's parents left on their holiday to Ibiza, the one I ruined with the flooding bathtub. A couple of times Mark led Sunday expeditions to a Buddhist monastery several miles away.  It was always exciting to get up early for a change, and to watch London slowly coming to life from the top deck of a double-decker bus. A path led down a lane to the monastery and the temple beside it.  The service consisted of all present sitting in meditation in the comfortable chapel for about a half hour or forty-five minutes.  It was very relaxing, and the meditations were led by a monk, who sat in front.  The layout of the chapel and pews wasn't that dissimilar from a Christian service - with the notable difference that no words were spoken, no hymns sung.  It was up to each of us to make our peace with the world. One morning a cat found its way into the chapel, and halfway through meditation it let out a yowl, and decided it wanted to go elsewhere.  It was amusing to see the startled look on all our faces at this unexpected interruption, but the monk calmly got up and let the cat out to wander off, and we resumed meditating. My impression of these mornings is of a tranquil blue atmosphere.  There was a subtle presence of blue energy always present after we had begun meditating, and my feeling was that the monk was pleased with the aura, which I'm sure he was very aware of. After the meditation session we would gather in the vestibule of the chapel, and drink tea and discuss religion.  Everyone present was offered an equal chance to speak, either to pose or to answer questions offered by the others present.  Not surprisingly, after the relaxing effects of the meditation, most of us didn't have much to say, the words would have just come between us and the immediacy of the experience of sitting calmly in the blue atmosphere of the chapel. One Sunday morning in early winter, when I was making one of my last visits to the chapel with a couple of other Eel Piers, it began to snow.  Many years later I still clearly remember the experience of walking down the narrow lane, crunching the white powder under my scuffed boots, when this haiku popped into my mind: walking to meditation  though fresh snow Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.

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how I came to live in the abandoned Eel Pie Island Hotel in 1969

This posting is a follow-up to yesterday's pic of the Eel Pie Island Hotel. Following is a chapter from my memoir/haibun Eel Pie Island Dharma. I self-published it in 1990 with  Unfinished Monument Press. Fellow Eel Pie survivor Weed posted it online in the early 2000s, and Tai Grove published a professional edition with Hidden Brook Press in 2012.  

 

Chapter 6 - Meeting Eel Pie

"Out of college, money spent  see no future, pay no rent  all the money's gone  no place to go ..."  Abbey Road, The Beatles

I nervously wandered off the curving streets of Richmond into the offices of the local newspaper to ask for a job.  I was surprised when I was taken seriously.  As a test assignment, the editor told me that a group of hippies had started a commune in an abandoned hotel in Twickenham, the next village along the Thames.  The directions were fascinating  -  the hotel was called Eel Pie Island Hotel, and it really was on a little island in the middle of the Thames.

I caught the double-decker bus to Twickenham, and quickly found the arched footbridge which led to Eel Pie Island.  It was about two hundred feet across the little bridge, with a beautiful view of the Thames.  When I had reached the island I felt I had entered a special place.  A footpath lined with neat little cottages wound through the centre of the island.  There was no missing the old hotel at the end of the footpath.  It was derelict, and I just walked in where the grand front entrance had once been.

Without any problems I quickly located the founder of the commune.  Cliff was an artist/cartoonist and an anarchist.  He was living with his American girlfriend, Ame, in a large room on the second floor of the hotel.  Cliff was a big bear of a man by English standards.  He had long, strawlike brown hair and an unkempt beard.  With his granny glasses he looked like a professor gone bad.  Ame was an All-American girl  -  fresh-faced and clean limbed with glasses  -  a professor's wife gone bad.

Cliff's easel and layout table and supplies spilled over one half of their large room, and in the other half was a big old mattress on the floor covered with quilts and blankets.  The scene was artsy and cozy and there was the musty smell of Thames dampness pervading.

It looked like an enticing way to live, very bohemian and independent and countercultural.  As I introduced myself to begin the interview, I was compelled to say, "I'm really a poet, not a reporter."

"What kind of poetry?" Cliff wanted to know.  "Mostly haiku poetry, it's a Japanese style," and I dug into my dolly bag to give them a copy of Cricket Formations.

"We want to build a commune of artists, especially politically conscious artists," Cliff explained.  "Why don't you pick out a room to use as a study and you could live here as part of the commune.  Only a couple of people have moved in so far.  You'd have your pick of rooms."

This was too good an offer to resist.  I dashed around the hollow building.  Too Much!  There were no flats available in the Greater London area.  I had been turfed out of two bedsitters in a week, and here I was being offered a room of my own in this picturesque setting.  Thoughts of the interview were forgotten.  I was a poet again.

EEL PIE ISLAND At first there were only a handful of hippies in the derelict hotel and I got a room instead of a story when I said I'm really a poet not a reporter Two years of my life sleepstoned hiding from the clammy Thames fog only our black and brown hashish smoke holding up the crumbling walls It's all so trite ten years later so far out and away from the foggy decay of spunksoaked mattresses Dougie, Crippled Eddie, Lorna Scotch John, Seamus Angie  -  Dominic Where are you now as the world discos towards 1984 to lift my head off the floor hand me a fuming chillum to kiss me tonight

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Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.

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Eel Pie Island (words & pics)   |   Cliff Harper - The Education of Desire

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May 15 is International Conscientious Objectors (CO) Day!

In 1969 I was 20 years old and living in the southern U.S. Although born in Canada I was eligible for the draft as a "resident alien"' (foreign national). I had applied for CO status to avoid serving in the unjust Vietnam War (the American War as the Vietnamese refer to it). I had organized a group  on my campus at Miami Dade Community College, The Student Action Committee (SAC, like Strategic Air Command).  I'd also been publishing a mimeographed anti-war paper titled "Papers" at the Miami Friends (Quakers) Centre. In June I received 3 draft notices in a week, and ended up living on the streets in squats in the UK for the next 3 years. My memoir about this was published in 1990 with Unfinished Monument Press and republished in a slicker edition in 2012 by Hidden Brook Press as Eel Pie Island Dharma.      

 Dear Friend of Conscience,  

May 15 is International Conscientious Objectors (CO) Day!

The Center on Conscience and War (CCW) invites you to join us in celebrating and honoring COs with a week of actions you can take to protect the right to conscientious objection for *all* COs - wherever they are.

Today, if you haven't already, please sign and share this letter to President Biden, asking his administration to end any further deportations of Russian COs.
 

After promising last year not to deport anyone seeking asylum from the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration suddenly deported a Russian CO earlier this spring, in what appears to be an incorrect or biased interpretation of US asylum policy regarding draft resistance.

Rejecting asylum claims based on draft resistance upholds the legitimacy of the draft, while undermining rights of conscience. As people working for an end to war and the right to freedom of religion and belief, we are called to protect the right to conscientious objection under US law. Without an active draft in the US, the Russian asylum seekers are bearing that burden for us right now. We are called to stand with them.

More actions you can take during this CO day/week of action:
 

1.After you sign the petition, you can call the White House (202-456-1111) and let them know you are concerned that deporting conscientious objectors seeking asylum in the US sets a bad precedent for all people of conscience.
2.Reach out to your member of Congress to alert them about your concerns and ask them to exercise their oversight and investigative authority to find out why COs are facing detention and deportation when they seek asylum in the US.
3.If you are in the northeast US, you can join War Resisters League and St. Francis Catholic Worker House on Wednesday, May 17, from 9:00-10:30 am at the US Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, outside the gates at McKinley Park, corner of Mohegan Avenue and Williams Street. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas will be speaking, as we deliver the message, End the inhumane border conditions, new restrictions and fast deportations.  Welcome Asylum Seekers!
4.Share the petition and letter with your friends and networks.  
 

Thank you for all you do to support conscientious objectors to war!




Sent via Action Network, a free online toolset anyone can use to organize. Click here to sign up and get started building an email list and creating online actions today.

New TV Series "1969" based on Chris Faiers's "Eel Pie Island Dharma" memoir

 

Well, it isn't official yet, and the rights are still very open for bidding. But I thought I'd better put the concept out there while I'm still alive and kicking. (and make sure my copyright is honoured when some smart producer twigs to this idea)

I'm a latecomer to binge watching TV. In fact I haven't watched TV for most of my life, and I haven't owned a TV set for decades. But during the pandemic I began binge watching TV at a friend's house to pass the time, and I've enjoyed quite a few of the current series, which was a new cultural experience for me. In fact I am so impressed with some of the political content in the new 1923 series that I wrote my first blog post about TV yesterday. Several years ago two young English actors and novice script writers wrote an extensive movie script based on my memoir/haibun Eel Pie Island Dharma about my hippy, commune living adventures in the late 1960s. I self-published this book in 1990 as Eel Pie Dharma with my Unfinished Monument Press, and it was republished in a professional format in 2012 by Hidden Brook Press as Eel Pie Island Dharma. Considering the incredibly vibrant music of the times, the sound track to 1969 is a no-brainer. 

Yep, drugs, sex, rock'n'roll, adventuring through the late 1960s - the chapter titles tell the tales:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

A Psychedelic Basho 144 Piccadilly Squat The Day We (Sort Of) Met George Harrison The Isle Of Wight Concert Bedsitters & Jools Meeting Eel Pie Eel Piers More Eel Piers Alice Eel Pie Days The Buddhist Monastery The Schoolgirls Dominic And The Gnome Homes Twickenham Cemetery

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

The Clap Clinic Tripping Formentera The Night The Hog Farmers Got Swamped Skinheads The Three Fishes Tripping To Cambridge Lavenham Hare Krishna Glastonbury Magic Festival Ireland Wales The Rich Hippie Mescaline On The Barbican

 

 

UK interview about Eel Pie Island commune

 Yesterday I had an enjoyable trans-Atlantic interview with Marnie Woodmeade for a podcast about the Eel Pie Island commune of half a century ago. Great to have the chance to reminisce and it was helpful that Marnie had read Eel Pie Island Dharma to prep for the interview. 

 On 14/04/2022 10:29, Marnie Woodmeade wrote:
 

 Hello!
 I am a trainee podcast producer at Transmission Roundhouse. Transmission Roundhouse is a socially engaged podcast platform powered
 by the Roundhouse. A home for niche, innovative and groundbreaking
 audio-led content that champions the voices of underrepresented young
 creatives.
 I am making a series of podcasts about how people find alternative
 communities and versions of home in the face of unworkable housing
 systems. I am doing an episode that focuses on the commune on Eel Pie
 island and would really like to interview someone who was part of it.
 I would basically like to speak to as many people as possible, and I
 can make this as easy for you as possible.
 I'm happy to have an informal chat with anyone who's interested!
 All the best,
 Marnie

--
Marnie Woodmeade (she/her)
Trainee Podcast Producer

Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road,
London, NW1 8EH

                           
                                                                ~    ~    ~

 

Hi Chris,

It was lovely to speak to you! You have a way of talking that really transports you, so it was great to hear your stories.

Thank you! I may take you up on that, I realise I totally forgot to ask you a few questions so I'm sure I'll be back in touch soon.

Sending positive vibes your way,
 Marnie

                                  . . . . . . 

On Thu, 12 May 2022 at 19:28, Chris Faiers <zenriver@sympatico.ca> wrote:
 

Hi Marnie,

l really enjoyed reminiscing about the Eel Pie Island days!

Best of luck with your podcast. If you need any missing pieces I'd love to add more memories  ;  )

peace & love,
Canadian Chris
                

Memory Lane: fan letter reminiscing about Three Fishes Pub

On 02/07/2021 20:21, Martin wrote:
Hello mate, hope you are well.
I was feeling nostalgic for my youth growing up in Kingston upon Thames and did a search for the Three Fishes pub, a place that holds many dear memories for me. This search turned up chapter 20 of your Eel Pie Dhama series. I read chapter 20, went on to chapter 21 and then started back at chapter one and read through the whole lot without stopping. What can I say? I loved your writing and enjoyed every minute of the read. I just finished chapter 28 and was saddened to realise there wasn't a chapter 29 and onward. I wish it was a whole book man.
Anyway, as you gave me such pleasure with the read I thought the least I could do was to let you know how much I enjoyed it. I hope this message reaches you mate and that life has been good to you since those days.
/ Cheers!/
/Martin/

 

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers

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Chapter 20 - The Three Fishes

Pub life in London reflected the British tendency to divide into classes and areas of interest.  There were upper class pubs, right wing pubs, Irish Republican pubs, working class pubs, and one unique pub where all the regulars were very short, young males who only listened to Eddie Cochran on the juke box.  There were skinhead pubs and of course hippie pubs.

The Three Fishes was a hippie pub, located on the corner next to the Kingston-Upon-Thames rail station.  The lights were dim, the music blaring rock'n'roll, and the clientele longhairs of both sexes.  At that time in Britain, kids as young as fifteen could get away with going into pubs, although the legal drinking age was eighteen, so there was the expected quota of schoolgirls and boys.

It was just the sort of atmosphere I loved after a hard day of digging graves.  On one of my first visits, a gorgeous young girl of about sixteen came and knelt before me, as if before a medieval knight.  She clasped her long hippie shawl about herself, and even I found I couldn't take advantage of her, and offer the expected walk home through the park:

Young girl     in an old shawl         kneeling

One summer evening I made the long ride into Kingston on my bike after work, and had a pint or two at the Three Fishes.  It stays light very late in Britain in summer, and so dusk was just turning to dark when I left after 9 p.m., and began undoing my bicycle lock.

In the half light I noticed something very strange.  There were several police vans parked outside, and more arriving every second.  In the dark I made out the shapes of several dozen policemen, and I realized that a raid was about to take place.

I wasn't drunk, only stupid, and some sense of hippie brotherhood won out over common sense.  I walked back into the Three Fishes and began yelling "It's a raid! - It's a raid!"

The office in charge followed me through the doors, and I was the first one grabbed.  "You're nicked," he snarled, and passed me to another bobby.  Bustled back out the door, I caught a glimpse of the pandemonium as drugs were dumped under most of the tables.  I was pushed onto a bus, much like a large tour bus, which the bobbies had requisitioned for the occasion, and soon I was joined by thirty or forty other longhairs.  Then the bus and several van loads of miscreants were taken down to Kingston police headquarters and booked.

I didn't get to sleep that night, as it took the police all night to process so many of us.  In the early morning light I found my way back to my locked bicycle, and slowly wound my way back towards Twickenham.

Our case didn't come up for a month, and the courtroom was a mob scene.  When my turn came, I pleaded "Guilty, Your Honour" to the charge of interfering with the raid by warning everyone, but I added, "I don't feel guilty, though."  The courtroom burst out laughing, both at the oddity of my charge, and at my unusual plea.  I was given a fine of thirty pounds, which was then my wages for about three weeks.

Hash aroma     and stale beer         under the table

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my thread in Haiku Canada (and in English language haiku)

Former President of Haiku Canada Terry Ann Carter is in the process of writing and publishing a history of Haiku Canada. Over the years I've sent her a number of chapbooks from the early days, and also replied to her questions as best I can. Following is a recent email I sent her to try to clarify my role in and perspective on some history of Haiku Canada (as well as on English language haiku in general).
 
I'll take a few mins now to try to fill in a few gaps in my background and role in haiku for you, as you sound confused about Unfinished Monument Press and other activities about where and when I was active in the haiku community, and especially how my history may fit in with the greater picture you're trying to uncover. Of course what I'm writing will be a bit solipsistic, but that's the best I can do, and I have been active in writing and publishing haiku from 1967 onward (now over half a century!)

You've also given me a great excuse NOT to go on the planned bitterly cold evening walk on the towpath by the Crowe, and I've poured a glass of chiraz to keep me inspired.

I was born in Hamilton (1948), but only lived there for a few months when I first returned to Canada in 1972 after living in a commune in London, UK and traveling around Europe. This story is told in my memoir "Eel Pie Dharma", first self-published with my Unfinished Monument Press in 1990 (one of the earliest English language book length haibun), and then republished with Tai Grove's Hidden Brook Press in a professional edition in 2012.

I didn't meet the Hamilton haijin, or any other haiku poets in person, until that first founding gathering of what became Haiku Canada at Eric Amann's apartment in the late 1970s. This is where I connected with Margaret Saunders, and it was probably through her that I also connected with Herb and then Jeff.


college days,  anti-draft activism and intro to haiku and Eric:

My intro to haiku happened while sitting in the library at Miami-Dade Junior College in 1967 (now Miami-Dade College) and I found an ad in the Village Voice classifieds for "Haiku" magazine. I'd been writing short poems, and the editor of the M-D lit mag, "Southwind", told me they resembled haiku. So I wrote off for a copy of "Haiku", and this is how I connected with Eric. Eric was a med student or doing his early hospital residencies in NYC, and had discovered haiku as a lonely expat Canadian. (Have you read Eric's autobiography, "The House on Fountain Street" - Can't find my signed copy right now in the dark of my study)

"Haiku" duly arrived and I immediately identified with the haiku form. My family had moved back to Key Biscayne (island off Miami) after living in a suburb of Atlanta during my high school years. I'd mistakenly registered with the draft board in Atlanta, which cost me dearly when I became very active in opposing the Vietnam War. I organized a campus group to counsel against the draft, and also began applying for conscientious objector status. Jim Christy has a parallel background with opposing the war. As one of the highest profile anti-war activists in Miami, the draft board, way off in Atlanta, soon went after me.

I was extremely stressed in this period (circa 1967-69), and I began writing haiku as an outlet for the stress and began sending haiku to Eric. Eric rejected my first attempts, but soon started accepting them for publication in his influential mag. I also began practicing yoga and meditation at this time.

Eric's "Haiku" was a leader in the very small field of haiku practitioners and small mags and broadsheets. There were a handful of these, but Eric's mag was acknowledged to be at the forefront in developing a modern, English language version of haiku. In the 1960s almost all haiku were written in the rigid 5-7-5 form, but Eric bravely promoted a shorter, looser form. He was my mentor, and I did my best to write haiku which fit into his forward thinking views. My haiku were published in all the small North American mags and broadsheets. But . . . in June 1969 the draft board caught  up with me and sent 3 induction notices in one week. It was time for me to leave the U.S. I was a permanent resident (green card holder) from age 7 or 8 until I left just weeks before my 21st birthday. As a foreign national they would have deported me rather than jailed me anyway I assume  : )

hippie street life in a commune and first 2 haiku collections in 1969:

Rather than return to Canada, my father thought I should go to England, which was a horrible idea. I stayed with my snotty older cousin and his doctor wife for a month or so, and then they unceremoniously threw me out into the street. I ended up living in the nearby Eel Pie Island Hotel hippie squat for the next 1 1/2 years. With the last of my small savings I self-published two chapbooks of haiku (I sent you one of these, "Cricket Formations") in the summer of 1969. The haiku in CF were all non-standard haiku, and most of them have stood the test of time and half a century later they are as publishable now as they were then considered cutting-edge in the small haiku community of the late 1960s. Michael McClintock, who remains a staunch haijin, published a selection of my haiku in one of the Amerikan haiku mags, with a very nice bio note and intro. This would have been circa 1970, and "Southwind", the Miami-Dade lit mag, also did a full page feature of my haiku. All of this didn't mean as much to me as it might have, as I was literally scrambling to find enough food to eat and a blanket to keep me warm in small room in the abandoned Eel Pie Island Hotel.

Return to Canada and poetry:

After 3 years of hippie street life and wandering about Europe (all detailed in "Eel Pie Island Dharma: a memoir/haibun) I desperately needed to  change my life at age 24. I decided to visit Canada. After all, Canada couldn't be any less impoverishing or squalid than my young life had become in England. I enrolled at university, but after years of smoking hash and dropping acid, the academic life didn't suit me. I ended up joining The Canadian Liberation Movement, a Maoist/Stalinist sect that was anti-imperialist as well as staunchly pro-Canadian culture. Too much happened to write about here, but in CLM I met one of Canada's leading poets, GG winner Milton Acorn. Friendship with Milton encouraged me to return to writing poetry, which I've continued to do ever since.

I did a variety of jobs to survive, including working as a steelworker/union organizer in Guelph and then a cook at the Univ. of Toronto. I even got chef's papers through George Brown College, but my calling continued to be poetry, including haiku.

I managed to get a few of my politikal poems published in leftwing papers and mags like "Alive" in Guelph and "the Red Menace" in Toronto. Around this time, 1976-77, I met Toronto poet Ted Plantos through a mutual friend, Tom Clement. Tom was working as manager with the remains of the publishing arm of the CLM after it disbanded circa 1975, and it was through Steel Rail Press publishing and meetingTed that I realized I could start my own small press, as Ted had done with his Old Nun Press.

Unfinished Monument Press and The Main Street Library Poetry Series:
Following Ted's example, I self-published a collection of my poetry, "Dominion Day in Jail", by founding Unfinished Monument Press in 1978. The monument referred to is a memorial to two of the martyrs in the 1838 Rebellion, a holdover from CLM days.

There was a burgeoning poetry scene in Toronto and other poets asked to share my Unfinished Monument imprint. Sometimes the poets did all the work themselves, and sometimes I did most of it. UMP published first collections by such prestigious poets as Robert Priest ("The Visible Man"), my friend Tom Clement ("Superman"), Jim Deahl's first work ("Real Poetry"), Margaret Saunder's first ((haiku "A Flock of Blackbirds"), Lynne Kositsky's first ("PCB Jam"), Bruce Hunter's first ("Selected Canadian Rifles") etc. etc. . UMP published quite a Who's Who of the Toronto poetry scene from its founding until I gave it to poet Jim Deahl in the early 1990s.

Ted Plantos had also coordinated a poetry series at a Cabbagetown branch of Toronto Libraries. He had recently folded the series, and as there was only one other ongoing poetry venue in Toronto at the time, The Axle-Tree Readings, I decided to again follow Ted's example and in 1979 I started the monthly Main Street Library Poetry Series at my local branch of Toronto Public Library (TPL).

By accident I had become a bit of an amateur impresario on the Toronto poetry scene, and I was able to first publish poets, or discover unpublished poets through the readings, and then feature them. I was also able to wrangle a job as a low paid desk clerk at the library through my volunteer work as the poetry series organizer. As the series was successful, I was further able to encourage many of my house poets by getting them onto the Canada Council list of sponsored readings (e.g. they could get paid to travel and do a few readings a year).

back to haiku:

So it was during this creative period of publishing poetry with UMP and featuring poets at the readings that Dr. Eric Amann and George Swede decided to hold an informal meeting of other haiku writers. As the founder of both UMP and the reading series, I was able to give various haiku poets the ability to publish and to perform their work.

On Oct. 21, 1981 I featured George Swede and the Haiku Workshop. Reading the signed guest book under flashlight, I can find George's name, Keith Southward (he was the original editor of HC's mag/newsletter "Inkstone), Denise Coney (she and Keith were a 'power haiku' couple for a while), Irene Mcguire, Jan Dawson, Nancy Prasad, Shaunt Basmajian, and myself of course. Probably others whose names I can't read or remember.

Many other major and minor poets read at the series, and there would have been features of other haiku poets. The series ran for 6 years and 62 readings. The readings played an important role in introducing poets to each other, and among the featured poets at a glance I see Milton Acorn, jones, Herb Barrett, Jeff Seffinga, Margaret Saunders. In total over 100 poets, and much of the creativity, the plotting, building and destruction of poetic empires, occurred at various pubs after the readings.


Phewww

Terry, I don't know if the above babble is going to help or confuse you!  Writing a history, even my own perhaps, will always have an element of revisionism. The complex intertwining of personal stories, serendipitous meetings, and a pint or two of lubrication makes the task of accurately documenting history, even as ephemeral a one as Haiku Canada's, an almost impossible task.

GOOD LUCK!!!

Chris/cricket