Eating Pizza with a Spoon is a biography of my brother, John Mark Brooks, who took his own life, July 28th, ’13, in Nashville, Tennessee. Musician, writer, businessman, comedian, cross-dresser, biographer, economist, he was a remarkable presence in our lives.
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Famous Lost Words is a compilation of quotations from famous people who might have had a temporary loss of memory and were forced to invent new ways of saying what they were famous for saying.
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Silhouettes is a collection of definitions as one might find in an online search, exploring the origin and uses of everyday language.
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Practically Advice is a collection of phrases, lines, and aphorisms. It follows Never Mind, Gertrude Stein in that regard.
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Savage Amusement The Autobiography of a Semi-Unknown Semi-Genius – A Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist in San Francisco in 1975.
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The Boy Who Named Himself is a fable, written in Lucknow, India, in early 1992 and performed for a small group of delightfully indifferent people from around the world on the lawn of the Carlton Hotel. One older woman said, at the time, “You may think this story will change the world, but it won’t.” She was right, of course. The world does or does not change itself.
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Café Life is a character study of the “third place.” Not home and not work, it is the café, coffeehouse, neighborhood bar, old style candy store or soda fountain. It is the modern equivalent of the town square or the watering hole where all the animals come.
Café Life is a partial gallery of the characters of one such place, The Owl and Monkey Café, on Ninth Avenue, on the NJudah trolley line, in San Francisco, during January of 1981, just as the Reagan Presidency was about to begin, not long after John Lennon had been shot, but it could be any year in any similar place, where people gather around a watering hole or a fire to warm themselves or refresh themselves, to find themselves, or to avoid themselves.
Such a café is a clearing in the woods that’s safe and unsafe at the same time. Some people will stay too long, and some people will stay away. Eventually, almost everyone will show up. I made a decision to sit still, in one place, for as long as I could, to stop running, to see who would come to me if I didn’t move. Over several years, I met literally thousands of people. This collection chronicles a few of them.
I’ll be forever grateful to The Owl and the Monkey Café and places like it. They are wonderful places, and I celebrate their existence. I’ve been writing, happily, in cafés for nearly forty years.
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Millie the Mermaid is a fictional story, written in the 90s, of sexual abuse, alcoholism, friendship, abandonment, love and fear. “I don’t know who these people are, and I can remember nothing in my life that parallels this story, but both of these characters came to life for me, and I cared for them as long as they were with me.”
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My Mother’s Chair was written in ’03-’04, when I was taking care of my mother, during the last year of her life. She was an imposing figure in my life and the lives of my two brothers. I was her other, as a small boy, and she was my first other. The story explores her effect on my life as an poet, artist and writer.
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My Mother’s Chair Introduction
A Likely Story (Altered Egos) is a collection of mostly fictional stories of the famous and infamous in history, with an added section of stories about contemporary figures.
“After floating for two days on the open sea, kept afloat by parts of her own demolished airplane, Amelia Earhart washed up on an island, where she was rescued by island natives, who had never heard of her and took her to be a blessing from the gods. They thought she was a visitor from an unidentified flying object they’d seen, days before, when it flew low and fast over their heads like a winged canoe in the sky.
Amelia herself finally accepted the role she denied at first, and became the most famous aviator in the world, Amelia From the Heart of the Air, She Who Crossed The Sky in a Winged Canoe.”
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Steve Brooks (Abhaya) - Poetry, Prose & Art 