Have a piece you’ve been trying for years to get published, but it continues to get rejected? If it’s potential readers you’re looking for and not money, there’s always the Brautigan Library.
The Brautigan library is where unpublished books go to live out their days in semi-obscurity; it’s kind of like the book version an animal shelter, but less depressing.
This weekend, hundreds of unpublished writers will attend the Brautigan Unconference, Creative Diddy-wah, and (inter)National Unpublished Writers Day at the Brautigan Library in Vancouver, Washington. Richard Brautigan, who was born seventy-eight years ago this month in nearby Tacoma, imagined a home for the unpublished, “unwanted . . . and haunted volumes of American writing” in his 1971 novel, The Abortion. The author committed suicide in 1984, before he could see the idea brought to life in 2010 by a Brautigan fanatic and local professor named John Barber, who is also the library’s director.
Wes Enzinna’s essay “Brautingan’s Heirs” takes reader’s through some of the library’s “classics” and discusses the publishing world with the library’s most “famous” contributing author.
