The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

Imagine if in the deserts all around you,
the lost lands
where you knew you would never ever go,
you went, and there discovered a world unimagined yet lived.
The world entwining yourself: jobs, hopes, dreams, ignorances
and just plain dumb bad luck,
has found you,
then you went.
You went because you saw someone else chasing a dream like a butterfly,
that man was retarded
and bleeding,
and you wanted to help.
But to help meant walking to Sunrise Mountain.
At night.
Till the marshes anyway.

Babybirds is my third book (60,000 words).
i also have a compilation of short stories – The World is Alright Today.
I have written a screenplay for one of my novels, Thy Soul’s Immensity. My first novel was written in 1994
and had to do with the race riots in Los Angeles
concerning the beating down of Rodney King.
I wrote for The Dudley Review and Alchemy on Sunday.
I attended Pacifica Graduate Institute (97) in California
and The University of Nevada, Reno (90)
with a year spent at State University of New York at Stony Brook
where I studied under historical Irish novelist and Joycean expert Thomas Flanagan
and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Louis Simpson.

It was an accidental jaunt away from societal norms, if just for a little while, for Evan, a just fired Casino executive.
By befriending “the Man,” Bernard Sandler, a severely retarded man on a mission to rescue “babybirds” on the “mountain,” (Bernard’s only two words), Evan discovers a world he frankly didn’t even know was there.
It is the world of the people of the marshes and the realm of sheer utter faith that better will come. It’s got to. It’s just got to. Or so they believe as they go.

From Babybirds
Copyright Library of Congress
2010
Fargo Kantrowitz

His mother had been gone for ten years now and Bernard had adjusted, but his memory of her remained. It has been said that when a parent dies they are not gone, but they move in with you. Bernard survived the loss of his mother through the absorption of her spirit, the unconscious memory of the musicality of her words and the green valleys that were her eyes. She had been storing good thoughts in his head in preparation for the time that he would need them and in Bernard’s case it seemed to have worked. Instead of dreaming of a lost and departed mother he dreamed of the beautiful things that his mother had introduced him to: animals and music and the lyrical quality of the spoken word which seemed to promise more and more beauty and goodness. In this way he lived a peaceful existence and was only rarely attacked by the demons that could seemingly destroy him, the demons that he tried to force out of his head through dizziness and that were sparked by the slightest thought that nobody but Bernard could ever know.

Thank you

Fargo Kantrowitz