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!).