“Evergreen” Introduction

I posted my novel "Evergreen" in installments. This intro includes links to all chapters in order.

Feb 08, 2025

In the fall of 2018, I decided to stop playing gigs. One of the many reasons was that I was in the middle of writing the novel Evergreen (and working a full-time job with my company Peghead Nation), and I was having trouble finding time to work on it. I worked best when I had a full day in front of me, with no duties or obligations (other than a long bike ride with my wife, Claudia), and these empty days were only possible on the weekends, which are, of course, when most gigs happen.

I finished the final draft of Evergreen in the fall of 2020 and started thinking about trying to find an agent for it. In 2018, I had begun sending a couple of short stories out to journals, hoping that an acceptance might spur an agent’s interest, especially since most of them wanted to see only the first ten pages of the novel, a quick elevator pitch, and a marketing plan. (“Wouldn’t that be the agent’s job,” I thought. “Welcome to the world of book publishing, Scott.”)

After a couple rounds of rejection letters (of two stories) from a couple of dozen journals), I realized that I wasn’t that interested in writing short stories. During the pandemic, I became more interested in music again. I was practicing regularly again and even writing a few tunes. I thought about self-publishing and started preparing the novel for proofreading. But after a serious bicycle crash in March 2021 (which required months of rehabilitation of the index finger on my left hand if I was ever going to play the guitar again), I realized that I didn’t really want to give up music for some imagined life as a writer. And I hadn’t written much of anything since I finished the novel, nearly a year and a half earlier. So, I let it sit. Until the beginning of 2025, when I realized I could publish it myself serially on Substack.

Evergreen is based on my first year at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and spans September 1973 to July 1974. The main character is based on me in some ways, but in many ways is not at all like me, at least not me back then. There are characters who were influenced by real people, but I invented many characters and events to make the story more interesting than my real life was that year.

It is not a memoir. For one thing, my memory isn’t good enough to write a memoir. The only way to write the story I wanted to tell was to make it fictional. I was lucky enough to find an online archive of the Evergreen student paper (The Cooper Point Journal) for most of that year, as well as another archive of the Evergreen weeklies Newsletter and Happenings, so many situations/scenes are drawn from actual events (Stokely Carmichael’s campus speech, for example), but what happens to the characters in those events is almost entirely fictional. I did a lot of research, however, and tried to make things as accurate as possible: the locations of things, the dates of events, how long it took to drive from one place to another, what movie I would have been likely to have seen on a trip to Vancouver, BC, during October 1973, etc.

Evergreen is a coming-of-age/loss-of-innocence story. The overall arc of the story is true. I started the year as a withdrawn, nerdy 18-year-old who had become enamored of the guitar and ended the year with a fully formed social life and the determination to become a full-time musician, though I had no idea what that might entail, or where my future might lie.

The idea for the novel came to me around 15 years ago. I thought of writing a story that combined my first year of college with something about Watergate and Ted Bundy, making it not just a story about my loss of innocence but the country’s loss of innocence as well. I was very political at the time and Watergate was the political story of the year. And, unbeknownst to me until nearly two decades later, one of Ted Bundy’s victims, Donna Manson, lived in the dorm next to mine that year and was abducted while on her way to a jazz concert on campus that I also probably attended. The short chapters on Watergate and Ted Bundy were heavily researched and I tried to be as accurate as I could. The poetic sections in the Ted Bundy chapters are rewritten/reimagined sections of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno that serve as a sort of voice inside Bundy’s head. Pretentious, I know, but that also seemed like something I might have thought of back then.

Most of the novel is written in the first person, present tense. I didn’t want the main character to know anything about the future, or how he might remember things years later. Thus, the often naïve, self-important, and clueless voice of the narrator.

One of the things that I thought of when I was trying to come up with a marketing plan for a potential agent was to make playlists of the music mentioned in Evergreen. I’ve made two Spotify playlists, one for Part 1 of Evergreen and one for Part 2. They run in the same order that the mentioned songs occur in the novel.

Links to Chapters in Order

PART ONE: Fall 1973

Chapter 1: September 23, 1973: Greyhound

Chapter 2: September 25, Organic Farm

Chapter 3: October 1, Book Group

Chapter 4: October 7, Stokely Carmichael Speech

Dick and Ted: October 10

Chapter 5: October 12–13, Vancouver

Chapter 6: October 19: Friday Night Movie

Dick and Ted: October 20

Chapter 7: November 5: Book Group 2

Chapter 8: November 9: Free Jazz