A Mini-Overview

When seventeen year-old Ken got home from his trip in 1971, it wasn’t long before he realized, “I’ve got to get this down on paper, or else forget what happened.”  The first copy (long since discarded), was 70 pages written in longhand on both sides of the page.  Within a few years, the story, originally called The Other Side of the Nation, was transcribed onto a typewriter.  It eventually ballooned out to 700 pages, and was constantly “under construction.”

“I was not only trying to tell an epic story, a heartfelt coming-of-age adventure that needed to be told, but I was looking for a certain rhythm and flow, almost as if what I was writing was a piece of music,” Ken says.  “It had to contain swells and hushes.  There had to be a mini-climax at the end of each tale.  For half of its existence, the book had no chapters.  It was one long scroll, almost like On the Road by Jack Kerouac.”

Ken tried for decades to get the book published, and met dozens of rejections.  “I got a few interesting bites, but nothing panned out.”  That didn’t stop his determination.  In fact, he says he’s grateful it took so long to get published—“it gave me the time I needed to flesh out the story in all its glory and its pitfalls.  I really wanted to put the reader on the road along with the two characters.  It had to be a thrilling eye-opener, representing all of life's glories and challenges.”

An interesting trivia about the book is that all 50 states are mentioned, and that the characters never eat the same meal twice, nor ride in the same style car twice.

“There is some embellishment and artistic license, but I feel it’s integral to the spirit of the story,” Ken says. “That’s why it’s a novel and not a memoir.  Actually, the trip took place so long ago, I don’t remember what is true and what isn’t.  It’s all meshed together.  So I have to consider what wound up on paper to be the actual trip.”

The character ‘Roger Winans’ is the name of one of Ken’s boyhood friends.  The name ‘Otto George’ was more agonizing to devise.  “I had to have a name that could be switched around, go backwards and forwards, a little unconventional but also German-Irish, to match the unpredictable personality of my friend, who was great in the trenches by the way,” Ken says.  "We brought no tent, only sleeping bags. My friend made me stick to our mantra of not paying for rides, nor paying to sleep."

We Picked Up was published in 2014 by Balboa Press of Bloomington, Indiana.