Every Friday for the next 12 weeks, we’ll be serializing Sons of Dionysus, a novel of myth, mirth, and music. But first, a word from the author:

When I met Jeremy Kuritomi, I was at a particularly low point in my life and he was at a particularly high point in his. He was celebrating his newly tenured professorship and I was at the same bar, mourning the loss of my cushy survival job. We got to talking as only two drunk people can do. That is to say: I can’t remember how. He told me he had written a novel and I ordered another whiskey.

“Here’s to you, Jeremy,” I said, hating him. I had always wanted to write a novel but had only managed short stories, songs and plays.

“The problem is,” he said with a sigh, “I can never publish it.”

His novel, he explained, was a debauched autobiographical exposé of his experiences with some sort of college cult when he was an undergrad. As a respected, now-tenured, professor, he could not imagine the humiliation that would result from outing his collegiate depravity.

“Tell you what,”  I said –and I remember these words precisely. “I’ll pretend I wrote it and give you the royalty checks.”

He laughed and said it was a great idea, but I could keep the money; he would be happy just to see his memories in print, doubly happy to keep his good name in the process.

“That’s not what most writers want,” I said.

“I’m not a writer,” he said and winked.  “You are.”

The next day, I received the manuscript via email with a simple message:

DO WITH IT WHAT YOU WILL, JK.

The rest will be history. Well, history and someone else’s memory, someone whose name is obviously, for his own protection, not really Jeremy Kuritomi.

Yours truly,

Jim Knable

Jim Knable is a Brooklyn-based writer of plays, songs, and prose (and the occasional screenplay).  His plays have been produced at MCC Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Soho Rep, NYC’s Summer Play Festival and other regional theaters, and have been published by Broadway Play Publishing, Dramatic Publishing, Samuel French, Smith & Kraus and Playscripts, Inc. He released his solo album Miles in 2000 and Redbeard (2006) and Golden Arrow (2009) with his band The Randy Bandits.