Entry 3: March 22, 2011 by Dr. J.R. Hustlegrowth

Fescennine was a character that I developed in the mid 1990s. I tore her name from a chemistry dictionary that I was reading. Later I found out that apart from its scientific definition, it had another meaning. It meant obscene poetry. Fescennine was suitable for a strong female character, someone who was willing to take control of her life by eliminating her oppressors.

For a long time her name loomed in my mind until a friend of mine asked me to write a poem for a short film idea that he was working on. The concept behind the film was he’d give me a few of his favourite lines from a famous hard-boiled writer, Jim Thomas, from the 1920s for me to use in my poem. When I finished writing, the plan was to have a woman read the poem. We could then use the narrative as the backbone of the film as we shot our images.

I began by pasting the photocopied lines down in my journal. I found out later that this approach to creative writing was known as cut-up and was made famous by cult writer William S. Boroughs. By leaving space between each line, I gave myself room to rough out the story.

As I wrote between the lines of the Jim Thomas pull-quotes, Fescennine began to materialize. It was like the words and phrases began to mold her, shape her, give her life. It wasn’t pretty. Her story was monstrous and vicious.

The film never happened but the story remained. For a long time I hoped to shoot  that film, it kept getting put off and deayed. A friend of mine who agreed to be Fescennine in the film modelled for me in a photo shoot. Out of a hundred photos that I shot, this one, in my opinion, captures the essence of Fescennine’s character.

Entry 2: March 5, 2011

Fescennine: My life

My once innocent, pleasant smile has been long gone, replaced by the hard lines of hatred. Ever since I was a child zombies have been after my flesh. I have been constantly haunted by their presence. No barricades seem to be able to stop them. They were persistent, pounding on my locked door until it tore free of its hinges. When I was old enough to realize that I could run away, I gathered up my belongings and escaped the house of the dead.

It didn’t take long before I found out that everyone was doing pretty much the same thing except in a different way. No matter where I ran there were creatures foaming at the mouth with monster’s hands wanting to crawl all over my young female body. For many years I tried desperately to elude them, without success. From one flophouse to another I was thrown. In each one, the workers and street people treated me like a blow-up doll. For 10 years I thought it was my fault that I attracted lowlife scum who would slither up and take advantage of me. Then one day a girlfriend of mine gave me some sound advice, “You better start carrying a switch and whip ‘em off of you, or they’ll do you to death.” So I did just that and started packin’ an eight milometer pistol.

This dead world realization was causing me much mental sickness. I felt as though I had a sticky residue coating my entire body from past encounters. If it’s true that killing changes people, then I was mutated into a fleshy engine fuelled by hatred where all types of creatures were liable to get screwed up in the machinery. My new philosophy on life was this; instead of letting trouble come to me, I would go to it. I would shove my gun into the faces of all the pricks who laid more than a finger on me and blow their brains out of their skulls.

I can’t seem to understand why most of the human race can’t realize that a lot of things are bound to go wrong in a world as big as this one. I figure that my mission is to punish the heck out of people for being people, to coax ‘em into revealing themselves, an’ kickin’ the crap out of ‘em.

Someone once said I looked lonesome. I had all kinds of company, all kinds, all dead.

Entry 1: February 25, 2011

Since 1991, I’ve been trying to write a novel. All I have are scraps of chapters, ideas scribbled down in a suitcase full of journals and a few short stories. It might seem like a lot but the problem I am faced with is that it lacks direction. Recently I have realized that the book-writing process says a lot about me. For a long time I have been without direction. Until now.