Admire the truck, but don't touch it. It belongs to the Godfather the "godfather of creative nonfiction," Lee Gutkind.
Gutkind is visiting Homer on the latest stop of the 2003-04 Godfather Tour, promoting his latest book, "Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather" (University of Nebraska Press).
Gutkind taught this week at the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference, but he wasn't up here only to lead wayward writers down the path of "introspective navel gazing," as James Wolcott said of Gutkind and creative nonfiction in an infamous "Vanity Fair" essay.
Gutkind and his son, Sam, 13, came to Alaska to go truckin'.
A few years back, father and son read "The Car," a 1994 novel by Gary Paulsen, Lee said. It's about Terry, a 15-year-old boy abandoned by his parents, who builds a kit car in the garage and searches for an uncle he barely knew. Terry hooks up with two Vietnam veterans and Deadheads, Wayne and Waylon, who take it upon themselves to teach Terry about life.
"We're going to take you truckin'," the guys tell Terry.
"We got excited by this concept of truckin'," said Gutkind. The Gutkind guys took to the road in a used Ford Ranger.
"We tried truckin' in our Audi, but it just wasn't the same," Lee said.
Gutkind's first book, "Bike Fever," 1974, was about his cross-country adventures on a motorcycle. He said his dream had always been to come up the Alaska Highway, so when he was invited to the 2004 Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference, Lee jumped at the chance for a road trip.
"We decided we were going to truck up here," Lee said.
Staying at lodges or hotels along the way, the Gutkinds left Pittsburgh June 12 and pulled into Homer last Thursday. Too young to drive, Sam navigates. He has a laptop with a GPS, a AAA TripTik and the Milepost.
Every morning they start the day with the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'," of course, and then cycle through classic 1960s and 1970s music: Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Johnny Cash, the Doors or Elvis Costello but not the Beatles. Lee isn't a big Beatles fan.
Oh, and the Beach Boys, what Sam calls "Mr. Melodia music," after a ballroom dance instructor he had in Pittsburgh who liked to play the Beach Boys.
"The guy always referred to himself in the third person," Sam said.
They even tried a CD compilation, "Road Music: The Best of the Best."
"It's the worst of the worst," said Sam.
Oh, and when you're dad's a writer, audio books are on the menu. Right now they're working their way through all 23 CDs 27 hours worth of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."
The Godfather Tour really began 17 years ago, when Wolcott dubbed Gutkind "the godfather of creative nonfiction" in "Me, Myself, and I," a four-page article Wolcott wrote in the Oct. 1997 issue of Vanity Fair. Gutkind started the first program in creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, and is the editor of the literary journal, Creative Nonfiction. He had become known as the champion of a new way of writing nonfiction daring, dramatic and literary, as he describes the concept in "The Creative Nonfiction Way of Life," an essay on his Web site at www.leegutkind.com. Gutkind was inspired by New Journalism, the nonfiction of the 1960s and 1970s of writers like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson Jr., or essayists like John McPhee or Tobias Wolff. And for that Wolcott took him to task.
"Creative writing and creative nonfiction are coming together, I fear, to form a big earnest blob of me-first sensibility," Wolcott wrote. He called creative nonfiction a "sickly transfusion, whereby the weakling personal voice of sensitive fiction is inserted into the beery carcass of nonfiction to form a big, earnest blob of me-first sensibility."
At a reading last Saturday, Gutkind talked about being so devastated by Wolcott's essay it was an ex-wife who told him about it that he laid low for a day. He cheered up, though, when a colleague at the university prostrated himself before Gutkind and said, "I bow down before the Godfather."
In a back-at-you, in-your-face response, Gutkind took the title on as a mantle of pride.
"It's the oddest thing, but it changed my life," he told the Pittsburgh Pulp last year. "It made an incredible difference to my career."
Thus, when "Forever Fat" was published and "Creative Nonfiction" celebrated its 10th anniversary, voila, Gutkind started the Godfather Tour, a series of readings, book signings and conferences from Baltimore to well, if this is June, it must be Alaska.
Sam and Lee both have been writing about their road trip.
"He does his journal, I do my journal," Lee said.
Gutkind said the two best books about Alaska were written by outsiders, John McPhee's "Coming into the Country" and Joe McGinnis's' "Going to Extremes."
"I don't think this is so bad," he said. "It takes an outsider from Outside to get perspective."
Like the literate chroniclers of Alaska before him, Lee has a few observations.
"The people here are different than we're used to," Lee said. "I say this with no disrespect: it's a quirky lot. 'Northern Exposure' it's not that dissimilar. Everyone we have talked to will take their time to talk."
He's also wowed by Alaska's spectacular scenery.
"I've been absolutely amazed at the enormity," Lee said. "There's a clarity, a pristineness. This is isolated. I like the fact that cell phone service sucks. There's a kind of spatial cushion of comfort that allows you to disconnect."
Of the Alaskans not born here, Lee said, "So many of them have come here accidentally, as a snap decision, and they may never go home. I can see it. I could absolutely never go home. It was a way of starting over. I think that's really neat. This doesn't happen in other parts of the world. I don't know what that all means."
Of the Alaska writers he has met at the conference, Lee said, "Let me just say, 'nature, nature, nature,' and after that, it's more nature. I don't mean this in a critical way.
Writers aren't usually that way. Here, it all comes back to nature, world and the environment."
The Gutkinds will have time to experience more nature in Alaska after they leave Homer. On their itinerary is halibut and trout fishing, maybe a flightseeing trip, Exit Glacier in Seward and then on to Haines to catch the ferry. From Bellingham, Wash., they'll head down the Pacific Coast, over to Santa Fe, N.M., and back to Pittsburgh in time for a robotics camp Sam will be attending.
Set the cruise control, crank up the Dead and watch the scenery go by. The Gutkind guys are on the road.
Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.
