The book – a biography of Peter Coyote, actor, writer, and proponent of Zen Buddhism.
California Zen: Peter Coyote Becomes a Human Being by Wilson Isaacsen-Gaunt
By being, for decades on end, in the right place at the right time, Peter was able to milk the best of the counterculture and institutionally established culture. And while that benefited Peter himself, it also often benefited others. [1]
[1] One of those others is Peter Rutledge Koch, the letterpress printer and book artist. Koch, a Montana native, was often found on the streets of San Francisco in the 60s into the 70s. In 1974, Koch decided to make his California move more permanent, relocating his Blackstone Press to San Francisco. He did so on a grant from the California Arts Council – a board including Coyote, who had read Koch’s poetry in a few magazines. By advocating for him on the Arts Council, Coyote marked a small turning point in a stranger’s life. But he wouldn’t be just a name on paper long. When Koch arrived in the city and rented an apartment in the Fillmore, he walked outside and found a man at a corner waiting for the delivery of a couch. Koch said to him “I’m looking for a guy named Peter Coyote.” “Well, you’re in the right place,” Coyote told him. No shit? No shit.
Myka, I think this is really punchy–all parts of it: the title, summary, regular writing and the footnote. Well done. It’s a good demonstration of the footnote being for what is too long to put in parentheses and I like how you use humor. My only suggestion is maybe to change is to was in the first sentence of the footnote? Even if Koch is still alive, which I think he is according to our discussion last week, I think since you are talking about a past occurrence between them and in the part before the foot notes, it makes sense to stay in past tense? Or if you are wanting to use present maybe to shift the whole thing. The footnote still will feel alive/relevant even if past tense I think because of the humor and concision.
Ah! Great great point about the tenses — thank you.
I really love footnotes that tell a great story as well as corroborate.
Your footnote not only fills out and dispels the passage’s cloudy vagueness of ending a statement on a term like “others” but gives us a snapshot of an event that the “others” is meant to imply.
I would enjoy more footnotes if they contained two “no shits” back-to-back.
But, seriously, there’s a lot of story here. Or, let’s say there’s a very promising situation begging to become a story.