“The true heart of a person lies in their character.” ~ Bill Bliss, Sr.
Gurney dropped by my office for a casual discussion about our working together on more oral histories. I sat mostly in stunned silence at how incredible his life has been. In case you’re unaware, before he was a creative writing professor, he was an editor and contributor on the Whole Earth Catalogue. And if you’re unfamiliar with that, it was, essentially, Amazon and Google before there was Amazon and Google. Gurney was in the middle of it all. His bestselling book, Divine Right’s Trip, was written specifically for the last issue of The Catalogue. It’s found on the lower right hand corner of the right hand pages throughout the catalogue. The final chapter, laid out around two dragons (symbolic of the Greek Ouroboros: the recreating of something such as the self), was also the final page. What may be the most amazing thing about this to me, besides the fact that he wrote the novel in pieces for The Catalogue, is that when it was gathered into a novel format, he never changed a word. Meaning, the book is first draft beginning to end. It wasn’t edited for The Catalogue, and he didn’t edit it for further publication. That, my friends, is totally awesome and just one reason why I love Gurney so much.
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