My Eerie, Scary, Weird Story of the Day

Before I begin... this story won't make sense without a little background info.

1. If you don't already know, I am a huge fan of Beat poetry. Kerouac and Ginsberg are two of my favorite writers/poets of all time.

2. I am in a playwriting class, and we were asked to bring in a source of inspiration. I brought in the poem "Sunflower Sutra" which is one of my favorite poems of all time, written by Ginsberg. It's about Ginsberg and Kerouac sitting around one afternoon talking about life and beauty and shit.

3. We were then asked to construct a scene combining elements of some of the inspiration pieces people brought in. I considered the idea of writing a scene about these two disgruntled men; I considered writing a play based on the Sunflower Sutra. It would be brilliant. I never wrote the scene, but it has stayed in the back of my mind, begging to be written.

Yes, I had said to myself, those weeks ago, "I'm gonna wait til we get our one-act assignment, and then I'm gonna write a play about Kerouac and Ginsberg, and it's gonna be friggin' awesome."

That was, until the scary thing happened.


4. Our book for playwriting class is called The Playwright's Guidebook: An insightful primer on the art of dramatic writing by Stuart Spencer. It's very interesting and helpful.

Then I got to Chapter Six: "Event."


Chapter Six begins like this:

"In my college course a student, Kate, was trying to finish a one-act play based on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The play was a fictionalized account of an encounter between the two men in the early 1960's, when Ginsberg's star was continuing to rise but Kerouac's had fallen sharply. At this moment, Allen has come to visit Jack in the Long Island home of Jack's mother, where Jack has been living and drinking himself into oblivion... ...Kate was ready to bring the play to a conclusion and expressed concern over just how she was going to do that. 'I don't really know what happens at the end,' she said. 'I haven't figured that out yet.' "

What. The. Fuck.

A college student named Kate is in a playwriting class and decides to write a one-act about Kerouac and Ginsberg.

Eerie, no? Who is this time-traveling author and how did they get this published?

And you know I couldn't have come upon that chapter before I had the idea for the play, because that would require doing my homework ahead of time!