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I’ve working on a biography of Isaac Bonewits.

As a writer, Isaac apparently never threw away any piece of paper with his own writing on it, nor any correspondence he received. I’m going through boxes of his files, scanning what I can, before shipping the files to the archives of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Some of the earliest papers in his files are the assignments he wrote in college in the late 1960s. In one of them (a creative writing class? I don’t know) he decided to write a faux introduction to his own life’s work:

"When one attempts to collect and edit the works of such a great and prodigious writer as Philip Emmons Bonewits one finds that he is faced with a monumental task."

To which the teacher wrote in the margin:

"Come on! Save it for your literary campaign."

And to which I say: Yeah, Isaac got another one right.