Romain Thomassin, a French filmmaker, is right now editing down hours and hours of film, made on location in mi-October for a commissioned 15-minute documentary on Hunter S. Thompson and San Francisco – featuring Hell’s Angels.

For that, he interviewed Peter Richardson, David Streitfeld, and me on location, in Hunter’s old hanging-out spots there. Just wrapped up. Now the hours and hours of film are being edited down to fit the show format. Final edits are in Paris in December. Then this will appear on French TV to an audience of 100,000. I’ll alert ou when short doc is posted on their website.

THEN THE JULY GONZOFEST, the final one. To celebrate Hunter S. Thompson’s birthday this year, a stellar lineup for a panel on The Hell’s Angels Letters gathered at Louisville. KY, July 13.  Here are some photos from past Gonzofests I attended.

Gonzofest 2023 was held at the High Horse Bar July 14-15, 2023 from noon until late into the night – A large bar and music venue.  And lots of music there was.

See the brand-new TV interview on the GF by founder Ron Whitehead here.

Attendees flocking from all over the country, snapped up the 400 tickets and made a most lively crowd. As did the expert Friday panel on The Hell’s Angels Letters. This Hunter S. Thompson themed festival is complete with an Art and Literary Contest, local breweries, and live music.

To read more, go here. And here. TO BUY TICKETS, GO HERE. 

Image credit above: graphic artist Mary Fields

Photo credits: Juan and me and my face: artist/poet Jinn Bug

If you would like a signed copy of any of my books, let me know so I can take a copy for you to the Gonzofest! There is also now an e-book option for The Hell’s Angels Letters on Amazon here!

THE HELL’S ANGELS LETTERS PANEL:

Earliest Hints of Gonzo:

Pranks, Agonies, as a Young Hunter Prepares His Launching Pad

Peter Richardson teaches Humanities and American Studies at San Francisco State University. His publications include critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and Carey McWilliams, who edited Thompson at The Nation magazine. He is currently writing a book about Rolling Stone magazine for the University of California Press. 

Margaret Ann Harrell spent thirty adventurous years abroad in Morocco and Europe, returning to the United States in 2001. She is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow and has authored eighteen books, including The Hell’s Angels Letters: Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic in collaboration with Ron Whitehead (Norfolk Press) and Space Encounters III—Inserting Consciousness into Collisions: A True Fantasy Adventure by the Earth through the Quantum Entangled World. Also, the Keep This Quiet! memoir series and Particle Pinata Poems. She is an editor and an advanced light body meditation teacher as well as a cloud photographer exhibited now and then in Romania, Italy, Bruges (Belgium), and New York City and a mentor to those wanting to go deeper into themselves and their potential.

William McKeen is a professor and the former Chair of the Department of Journalism at Boston University; he is the author or editor of thirteen successful books, including Outlaw Journalist, Mile Marker Zero, and Everybody Had an Ocean. McKeen teaches journalism history, literary journalism, and rock n’ roll and American culture and previously taught at Western Kentucky University, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Florida, where he chaired the department of journalism. Before beginning his teaching career, he was a reporter, then associate editor of The American Spectator and the Saturday Evening Post. Mile Marker Zero is “a tall but telescopic-sight-true tale of Hunter Thompson, Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and a large cavorting cast running around with sand in their shoes at ‘ground zero for lust and greed and most of the other deadly sins,’ Key West,” wrote Tom Wolfe. McKeen spent his early years in England, Germany, Nebraska, and Texas.

Dr. John F. Brick teaches English, first-year rhetoric, and creative writing at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His scholarship includes a comprehensive annotated variorum of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which traces the development of Thompson’s 1971 classic across extant texts and archival documents and provides comprehensive historical, cultural, and literary context. The result not only recaptures something of the first blush of Vegas‘ satire and profundity but offers unprecedented granularity in examining Thompson’s creative process at the height of his powers. Dr. Brick’s most recent work examines intersections of sportswriting and nationalism. In his spare time he enjoys distance running and cycling, and playing for the Milwaukee Hurling Club.

Timothy Jack Denevi is a professor in the MFA program at George Mason University and the past nonfiction editor of Literary Hub. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Time, the Paris Review, and New York Magazine, to name a few. And he has been interviewed prolifically, across the spectrum of major news outlets, including the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, following the release of his highly successful Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade against American Fascism. Denevi grew up in Los Gatos, California, and lives near Washington DC. He is a MacDowell Colony fellow and a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Ron Whitehead, co-founder of & Chief of Poetics for GonzoFest, is a Lifetime US National Beat Poet Laureate. His life is newly documented in the film Outlaw Poet: The Legend of Ron Whitehead (2022). “Ron Whitehead is Bodhisattva in Kentucky,” said Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics,” said Hunter S. Thompson. An award-winning poet and performer, author of 30 books and 40 albums, his words have been translated into twenty languages.

 Art by Grant Goodwine 

Inside the Kitchen

With Rory Feehan at the Frazier 2019

Margaret Harrell – Hunter Thompson

Juan Thompson and me over dinner in the Brown Hotel

Juan Thompson, Margaret Harrell, a firing range

Photo credit: Jinn Bug

Ron Whitehead and Jinn Bug

The post Gonzo NEWS: 2024 French Documentary, PLUS Tim Denevi, William McKeen, Ron Whitehead, Peter Richardson, Dr. John Brick, et al. at Gonzofest in July appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

Click to read the marvelous interview conducted by John Kennedy.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself. He sets the interview up this way:

Never for a moment quail before your antagonists. Your fearlessness will be to them a sure token of impending destruction, but to you it will be a sure token of your salvation—a token coming from God. – Philippians 1:28

She says life has taught her that being spiritually fearless and unapologetically yourself is an essential component of identifying and nourishing the God-given gifts and purpose one is born with. She realized that to achieve that for herself she needed to cast aside crippling self-consciousness. Achieving that easier-said-than-done goal, she remembers, was greatly assisted by some of the notable men in her life. In her memoirs, Harrell illustrates how  Thompson, Klonsky, and Mensaert particularly exhibited the sort of authenticity that was vital to helping her learn how to express her true self.

JWK: You’re latest book is called The Hell’s Angels Letters and is a full-color coffee table book that follows up on your Keep This Quiet! memoir as . . . 

Click on the link to read the article.

A marvelous thank-you to the publisher, John Kennedy.

The post On beliefnet.com – How Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky and Jan Mensaert taught me the power of fearlessness appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

The host was marvelous, keeping things lively. Robert Sharpe has very thoughtful, interesting, wide-ranging topics. And he was ready to find them in Keep This Quiet Too! – vol. II of the KTQ! series. BookLife, the indie arm of Publishers Weekly, has its verdict on the book:

With an eye for surprising detail, Harrell conjures a charged and vivid milieu, even as the story she tells is often painful . . . A journey with grand destinations throughout the globe and within the author’s consciousness. – 

BookLife further calls it: “charged, vivid, painful, grand.” I’ll take it.  Also of interest, says the reviewer, is “her abundant enticing experiences and insights, and her relationships with her subjects.” The review opens:

“I’m not crazier than you,” Harrell reports once saying to her friend Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson’s response: “No, but you talk crazier.” That exchange, recounted in an introductory author’s note, kicks off the second in a series of memoirs (after Keep This Quiet!) by Harrell that examine her relationship with three fascinating men of letters: first that gonzo icon Thompson, for whom Harrell served as an editor at Random House and maintained a friendship with through his years of covering horse races and regatas, and Milton Klonsky, the beat writer who was her literary and spiritual advisor. Finally, there is the poet Jan Mensaert, her troubled husband, whose struggle with drugs, alcohol, and mental illness overshadowed his considerable artistic abilities.

“Horse races and regatta,” that’s a funny take on all the political news tackled. Just scratching the surface.

I’m VERY appreciative of the review, with phrases that lift out beautifully. And those topics and facets were on full display in this interview.

The post Now LIVE: My fascinating chat with Robert Sharpe, BITEradio show “Bringing Inspiration to Earth” April 18 appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

is one of my favorite books by me. Readers often tell me how much they like it. Yet it’s not nearly so well known as Keep This Quiet! The human story in it is complex, about four writers’ lives as they intermix with each other. Three very intelligent, fabulous males in all their complexity, spread across a continent and a globe, that I, in my “hub” in Morocco or leaving once a year for a month in the United States kept exciting ties with.

Just landed on New York City soil, for a brief stopover in New York, where did I go? Of course, unannounced, my feet took me down to West Fourth Street in the  Village, walking the entire distance from midtown, telling myself I didn’t know where I was walking to. Of course, I knew. To Milton’s for my yearly indispensable feasting on his witticisms and steely analysis of whatever current predicament I found myself in in my marriage. His advice might be, when I bemoaned Jan’s suicidal tendencies,”Give him something to rise to. . . Or go down with him. But don’t be a bystander while this man commits suicide.” Never, that is, be a bystander in your life. Plunge into it. I always felt ten miles high, like Alice, after listening to such talk from an insider, who knew life through and through. And had the soul of a guru. With Hunter the attraction was something else. But deep and strong – and necessary – it was. And we often caught up on these trips to the States. Then back to Morocco, to my primitive sunny lifestyle there. Temporary, I always knew. But temporary was lonjg. Fourteen years of Oum Kalthoum, and Jacques Brel, and of course Mozart, all Jan’s favorites. And I forget Piaf.

REVIEWS:

“A passionately written memoir that doesn’t sit around being fit and proper and straight laced . . . As a key to the lives of these three writers it is idiosyncratic and in age where blandness is the norm, it is a pleasure to go on her journey and find out a little about what made these men tick and what drove her to them – Eric Jacobs” – Beat Scene print magazine (UK) # 70

Click here for a short YouTube video with some art and drawings by Jan during our life in Morocco.

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

In this sequel to Keep This Quiet! Margaret relocates to Morocco with her exotic, fascinating, unstable Belgian poet husband, Jan Mensaert. Living in villages, she adopts the local lifestyle of cooking on charcoal and shops for fresh groceries daily with a basket in open air markets. But the main focus is on her encounters with the three male protagonists, “outlaw” authors one and all, brilliantly creative and with the personalities that match. In once-yearly trips to the United Statets, she re-energizes on a diet of one-liner advice, deeply digested and wise, from genius-poet Milton Klonsky. This, she reports to the reader, magically as if her mind were a tape recorder. She also gets Gonzo updates from Hunter Thompson – two relationships that never lose their hold or significance, even necessity. From Morocco, to Belgium, to Switzerland, and the United States, Margaret pits wits with – learns from – and grows through these rare, close – sometimes romantic – relationships with men who exemplify authenticity. At one point, trying desperately to find her, Hunter writes, “Dear Margaret, Where are you and why? I’ve lost track completely. My last definite word was from a toilet-hole in Algiers.” He wants her to work on his next manuscript. This is 1971. Moving from 1970 (Belgium/a Cairo honeymoon) to 1986 (the Jung Institute Zurich), the book ends up fittingly at Hunter’s Owl Farm. Where else could the last two chapters take place? There, she reintroduces herself to Hunter. In fine form, he is trying to take the romance to the next level.
Actually, they both are intent on it.

REVIEWS:

“Margaret A. Harrell has done it again. In her brutally compassionately explicitly honest second autobiography KEEP THIS QUIET TOO! Harrell manages to repeatedly pull the rug out fromunder the reader. She travels from North Carolina to New York City to Morocco to Belgium to India toSwitzerland to Owl Farm, and many other places,…in search of her self. From depth psychology to dream analysis tohangoutologies to ecstatic love making to out of body astral travels to spirit guides, adventures andmisadventures, she is guided and guides herself ever homeward to her own heart and soul. Margaret A. Harrell’snew, second, autobiography, like volume one, is a masterpiece.” – Outlaw Poet Ron Whitehead

“Keep THIS Quiet Too! is a real-life saga of living and learning with eyes and ears open. At times adventurous, at times sensual, Keep This Quiet Too! hinges upon the complexities of human relationships, especially the challenges posed by the heart-wrenching feelings of love that may or may not be fully requited. Highly recommended.” – Midwest Book Review

“An honest and unflinching examination of the choices we make.” – San Francisco Book Review

Click for another short video of Spanish dances and honkeytonk composed by Jan Mensaert, played at his fast pace. A deeply artistic personality with all the drawbacks that can go with it. And the ebullient upside.

I love this piano music. Jan was a natural entertainer, but if you ever wanted to meet an artist in your life, he was the consummate artist. That’s one of the main reasons I was attracted to him.

A cameo appearance comes in from 1990, Willy Van Luyten, my boyfriend at the time, who also got roped into the drama of my life as it unfolded on a spiritual level at this point.

Willy Van Luyten

A short video clip taken from Nick Storm’s videography of my first presentation at the Louisville Gonzofest. This one is on first meeting Hunter. Need I say more?

Hunter Thompson at ranch 1991, where the book ends

The post HARDCOVER Keep THIS Quiet Too! – finally appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

The post Hunter-Gatherers Podcast 2023 podcast interview appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

The post Hunter Thompson and Playboy – Rejections appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

After great insistence, in the early 1970s, he made me a music reel with this and other music – playing it himself. I no longer remember whether he recorded it in his home in Belgium or his adopted home in Morocco, where he lived many years. And during part of that time even had a piano that had been hoisted into his apartment in Larache. I was extremely impressed by all the facets of art he plunged into and surrounded himself by, though he was professionally a poet. The Trailer shows him playing one of his music tunes – he loved melody – with a honky tonk beat that he called “Pretty Margaret.” Jan is in the trio of men – along with Hunter Thompson and Milton Klonsky – you can read about in Keep This Quiet! and Keep THIS Quiet Too! Like Hunter but faraway in Morocco, he lived “on the edge.”

MORE ABOUT HOW THE REEL CAME TO BE ON CD

Years later still, when moving to Switzerland and then Belgium, I left the reel, the sole copy of this music, in my storage in North Carolina.

It was fifteen years more before I went to search for it in 2000, hoping to use it in the “Retrospective on the Life and Work of Jan Mensaert” by the Belgian museum Het Toreke. By then the storage room was dilapidated. Papers had been eaten by insects, even though the room was supposed to be well kept. I had no idea where the old reel was. I was only in the US briefly. I had gotten a ride to Greenville, NC, to the unit and searched it for an hour to no avail. Giving it one last attempt, I turned toward the door, placing my hand in a cabinet, and there it was!

The next step was just as hard. Was the reel still viable? The man in charge of music for the exhibit – because Jan had left 1,000 or more sheets of music in his attic in Belgium, music of all sorts (from sonatas to orchestral works) he’d written while young and hoping to be a composer – was Bruce Wands, Chair MFA Computer Art Department, director of computer education, School of Visual Arts; artist; writer; musician; producer, director. If anyone could rescue the lost music from the old reel, he was a good bet.

It was another fluke that he was even in the project. I had brought him in, having first contacted him to work on a theater festival in Romania. I had asked around New York City for someone with art background who might help out Romanians, and he was the only person suggested. That left me a foot in the door to ask if he’d work on this project – this time for pay. He said yes. We listened expectantly as the old reel began to turn. Would music come out, or was it hopelessly damaged like some of Jan’s photography slides, though even those had been cleaned in a Belgian lab and you can see some of them on the Trailer.

When the first sounds started, we were amazed they had survived. But Bruce wondered aloud if the speed was too fast. Did he really play that fast? Yes, I said. Some of the  time.

I hope you enjoy this. I had always – way before the technology age – assumed this is the way art survives. Someone discovers it long after the death of the composer or writer or painter and brings it out to the public. Those days are gone, I suppose. But here is a relic of the past, when music and writings and a painting here and there were found in old libraries or collections or attics – surviving by discovery in the nick of time.

The black-and-white Modigliani-like female above is also by Jan. But it was in bold colors of orange and green. The original is at Het Toreke.

Jan and Margaret in Belgium at the time of their wedding

The post Music Trailer – Honky Tonk – Keep THIS Quiet Too! appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

Jan Mensaert entered the Keep This Quiet! series in vol. I. I first met him in Casablanca, Morocco, on a trip. And immediately traveled by bus back with him to Larache, where he was teaching French. A Belgian from Flemish Brabant, he spoke French fluently. Likewise English. Four years passed, and we did not meet.  But in those few intense days in Morocco, I was knocked overboard by my impression of him as a true artist. It wasn’t even a romance at the time. And what might have been two ships passing in the night had blossomed through letters. The jaw-dropping one below hurried me into a decision to fly to Belgium and revisit. My initial intent, however, was to use him to inspire a character in my next novel. He was too unusual, too unique, I thought, for my novelistic self not to see him at least once more. This letter set up that meeting. Instead of deterring me, it lured me on. I was at MacDowell Colony for artists, finishing up my first book (I thought), when it arrived. The excerpt below is from Keep This Quiet!

I began like this: ” A very dramatic letter slid in, like a baseball player putting his foot onto the plate. It was from Jean-Marie. It fulfilled his role of inevitably, touchingly—with the right balance of art and reality—providing something so extreme it sounded like fiction.” Strangely, December 27, twenty-two years later, would be the day of Jan’s suicide:

27 December, 1968 

My best wishes for a merry Christmas, a happy New Year with plenty of American astronauts on the moon and food in Biafra and a meeting between the two of us . . . I’ve actually started thinking of those Spanish dances . . . I am thinking so well that I’ve got six of them all clear in my mind and a little more confusedly in my fingers. The left hand is pretty rough. But it’s hell to write them down. I’ve started with the simplest one and my eyes are dazzling with little black spots and bars and keys and stars of inspiration. I’m afraid it will go with my olé-olé music the way it went with . . . It may sound like something made by an Eskimo on a six month’s night after reading the Alhambra Tales . . .

The Spanish Dances survived 30 risky years in my storage. In 2001, the old reel was delicately put into modern CD format. They are now uploaded in YouTube music clips. Just click to listen. But back to the serious part of the letter. Immediately he begins to catch me up, being an invariable storyteller:

And now for the wild story of my last adventure . . . when I took the train to Athens the intention wasn’t to pray on the moonlit Acropolis but to get to Santorini and have a very good time—lived with six Swiss air hostesses whom I happened to get acquainted with and which were spending their holiday there in a wonderful house built with so many terraces on the caldeira—and then, when money and air-hostesses were about to be going, committed suicide, or at least tried very hard to. It was very well planned; drank a gallon and a pint of ouzo, hid with a couple of spiders in a dark corner and cut a couple of veins and nerves of my upper arm.

Blood came spouting and I felt very happy. And then something happened which I still can’t explain. I wasn’t suffering, I wasn’t afraid of dying—that’s what the ouzo was for—I was lying there and felt very comfortable and satisfied with the things being, went on drinking and singing and thinking of Thailand and Morocco and Margaret of the good olden days which would never return and then suddenly I got up and ran for the nearest-by place. Not for help. I realize now that I was only looking for human companionship, that I didn’t want to die with only spiders for company. Got to a café—this thrilling story takes place in a spooky little hamlet high up on the warm and misty cliffs of an exploded volcano, where Hephaistos dwells and Orpheus sings his songs of woe—and was a sensation. I enjoyed it. The owner ran for the Swiss girls and they came and hugged me and kissed me and spilt their sweet tears on my face and took off their stockings to bind off my arm and never succeeded, while all around me people were quarreling about what had and hadn’t to be done. I forget what happened next. Didn’t faint, it was the effect of the ouzo. When I sobered up. I was lying on an improvised operation table and still bleeding.

I confess it most humbly, I panicked. Inwardly, that is. I was sure now I was going to die and the sensation isn’t an agreeable one when one (hm!) isn’t drunk. The blood kept spouting and filling the back of my trousers and everybody was trying to stop it and touched the cut nerves and it was like having your 32 teeth extracted at the same time while my heart was hurting like hell. Then finally when I was hearing the angels singing and the bells tolling and a Swiss girl asking for a glass of brandy something very much like a doctor came and said abracadabra while burning herbs unknown to me and stopped the bleeding. It was morning by then and I was to be flown to Athens but somehow nobody knew where the helicopter who was to do the job was. So I was carried down the 600 and so many steps to the port, was put on a ship where everybody thought they were bringing a corpse. Because of the sun they had completely covered me with a blanket. In the Piraeus hospital nobody seemed to know narcotics had been invented some years ago and so, while they were sewing up my nerves, I swore I would never try to commit suicide again and die as an antique dealer. Stayed in the hospital for about a week and then decided to go to Prague . . .

It didn’t end there:

Had a rotten Christmas, though a white one. Slept. True to my oath I’ve become an antique dealer. . . . Never met so much vanity in my life . . . The shop has been open for not even four weeks and I’ve sold for 3.000 dollars worth, representing 2.000 dollars benefit. I would never have expected it . . .

Going on with my life story and resuming it, flew from Athens to Prague and got there one day before the Russians did, fell in love with the Czechs, an admirable lot, came back to Belgium, after having been thrown out by the Russians, and am busy having my arm reeducated. This seems to be a failure, it’s lamer than it ever was. Even my fingers, of which I still had control one month ago, are giving it up. Yesterday I’ve tried to record your Spanish dances in a simplified version. It was laughable. Am smoking tar-filled cigarettes now hoping for a lung cancer which, I am told, is the less painful species of cancer being . . .
Burned my last novel, which may have been good, my last poems, which were excellent, I know, would burn my paintings but they weren’t worth the trouble. A Gotterdammerung mood.  It’s rotten to have an artist’s sensibility and desires and ups and downs and not to be one.

Instead of wringing my hands, I remembered the playful, twenty-eight-year-old at his home (above) in Larache. And was intrigued and of course frightened. Clicking here, you can experience him playing a honkeytonk tune he wrote. Playing it in high speed. (Likewise miraculously salvaged on the tape in 2001.) I marveled that “this letter was a little treasure: How could the experience that should have accented pain accent humor; that should have accented transformation instead accent close observation?” It was “the artistic personality,” at its most visible, I concluded.  

I saw this lifestyle inside “the artistic personality”—though I was huddled down, secretive, throwing my black coat over my manuscript pages on the floor if Milton came to the door unexpectedly. No one could even see the sheets of paper.
At Columbia University I had loved a passage in Henry James’s The Ambassadors—in my paraphrase: “Live, live, live, it’s a mistake not to!” More recently Milton had mentioned—in joking warning—“the lineaments of unlived lines.”
In my book I played up his self-portrait as a “teabag steeped in life” (or that he had a “face like a creekbed”). I named the character Robert—not for (but in that way like) Robert Penn Warren, who one day walked past my office, his craggy wrinkles in full display.

Alternately, I very much thrived—and still do—on ideas. Milton noted the “metaphysics of your structure.” 

Keep THIS Quiet Too! changes continents and cultures. From sophisticated New York City and hip Greenwich Village, reuniting with Belgian poet Jan Mensaert  in Germany – captivated  by his eternal-youth charm and poet maudit artistic potential – I rejected all advice to the contrary and married. Then moved with him to Larache.

Jan got there by way of many travels prior to meeting me. Many of the photographic shots in his archives show narrow entrances and exits. Below is a stairs with a narrow shadow.

Jan’s apartment in Larache, when I first met him, was a big surprise; it had  a Western record  player and piles of LPs, including lots of classical; also a collection of brass and copper knickknacks. But the kitchen was typically Moroccan, with fresh local food cooked on charcoal. (No refrigerator.) I kept up the tradition when I moved in there.

At the bottom of this page is one of many drawings Jan made, sitting at his desk, waiting to start writing. Though freehand doodles, they are strikingly detailed. He said, “My first ambition was to be an architect.” This one is a cathedral. Others were witty and humorous. I bought the whole package of art. If only he’d be a bit more stable. I tried. He resisted. We had fun; both wrote. But eventually this bohemian life, I was sure, on my part, had to end. Anyway, it did. Not, though, without a lot of stories. And many cultures broadening my vista. I hope everyone gets the chance to see how people live around the world. No education is finer.

Giving me advice about Jan throughout, with depth visible in the directness and sometimes shock value, was Milton Klonsky, whom – after marriage – I saw one day a year. As introduced in volume one, he’s in the series to stay. Whenever I traveled back to the U.S., I stopped in New York City just to get his take on my life, the trials I’d, sometimes farcically, been through since we last met. No wisdom keeper could have heard me out better. I copied down his phrases like little finely cut diamonds, which you’ll find in KTQ Too!

For instance, one of the most dramatic bits of very serious advice said was regarding Jan’s self-destructiveness:

Give him something to rise to. Don’t sink with him. Or sink with him. And then kill yourself. But don’t be a bystander while this man commits suicide.

That may be the boldest, bluntest thing anyone ever said to me. It was way out of left field. But it fit the circumstances. He was worried about me. He gave me  a stern warning.

  Naturally, Hunter Thompson is on the scene as well. Or off stage. Sometimes on. Sometimes only with letters. In the end of KTQ Too!, he’s there in person at his ranch for an attempt to get the romance actually in “the history books.” Well, it worked up to a point.

A passionately written memoir that doesn’t sit around being fit and proper and straight laced. . . . As a key to the lives of these three writers it is idiosyncratic and in age where blandness is the norm, it is a pleasure to go on her journey and find out a little about what made these men tick and what drove her to them—Eric Jacobs, Beat Scene (UK)

At times adventurous, at times sensual, Keep THIS Quiet Too! hinges upon the complexities of human relationships, especially the challenges posed by the heart-wrenching feelings of love that may or may not be fully requited. Highly recommended—Midwest Book Review

The post Keep This Quiet! Vol. 2 – Jan Mensaert appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

This was especially important, as a lot  of Jan Mensaert’s line drawings are in it (like the one below). Also, some decorated Hunter Thompson letters – in color. Hunter like to add little illustrations to his signatures. Take a look at the Kindle Sample.

In Morocco, Belgium, Switzerland, and the United States, Margaret pits wits with – and learns from – Gonzo creator Hunter S. Thompson, New York City poet-genius Milton Klonsky, and her eventual husband, Belgian poet Jan Mensaert. At one point, trying desperately to find her, Hunter writes, “Dear Margaret, Where are you and why? I’ve lost track completely. My last definite word was from a toilet-hole in Algiers.” Hunter wants her to work on his next manuscript. This is 1971. Moving from 1970 (Belgium/Cairo) to 1986 (the Jung Institute Zurich), the book ends up fittingly at Owl Farm. Where else could the last chapter – really last two chapters – of the book take place? There, Hunter is in fine form, trying to take the romance to the next level. Actually, they both are intent on it.

Drawing by Jan Mensaert

The post Keep THIS Quiet Too! KINDLE – BRAND NEW appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

A Margaret Harrell Q&A

The post An Interview with HST Books about the Keep this Quiet! Book Series appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.