A Tribute to Jim Harstad

Jim’s writing is preserved not only in the issues of Bamboo Ridge but also here on the website. Going all the way back to 2010, when our Bamboo Shoots online writing community first began, Jim was an avid contributor to our monthly contests.

Every month, consistently and without fail, Jim rose to the challenges set forth by our community director the “Bamboo Buckaroo.” Whether it was a hundred words of micro-fiction or a haiku, Jim humbly wrote and shared. He encouraged others to write and share, commented on their pieces and gave advice. He was a positive co-conspiring wordsmith who made writing fun. You can read all of his entries here.

Starting in May of 2018, in addition to his Bamboo Shoots entries, Jim began to post a thousand words of his memoir, ON HE RODE, to share with the BR ʻOhana. It was in his own terms, “a very rough draft of an almost paranormal adventure that took place in the summer of 1968.” And every month, at the beginning of the month, we’d all look forward to reading the next installment.

In celebration of our friend, we’ve compiled the chapters of his memoir (over four years of writing) and present them to you in the flipbook below. I’ll let him introduce it with a quote pulled from one of the early chapters:

Allow me to interrupt, Dear Reader (if, in fact, anybody out there is actually reading and trying to make sense of this exploration of personal events from the landmark summer of 1968), to formally acknowledge the rough-draft nature of this effort. It is, after all, a rough draft. You might then ask why I don’t keep my rough draft to myself until I’ve had a chance to give it a more socially acceptable coat of polish? The answer is that I’ve tried that, with mostly unsatisfactory results — consequences, almost. It’s complicated.

So complicated that I will over-simplify by saying that it is almost solely through the generosity of that most generous of hombres, the Bamboo Buckaroo himself, that I am able to keep producing this semblance of narrative flow. By allowing me to post a thousand unprescribed and unjudged words a month, he offers a challenge and an opportunity that even the laziest, most undisciplined bones in my body, the ones that hold this pen, can’t resist. Thus, this homely narrative.

To view the memoir in full screen, click the square icon to the right of the cover. To read these chapters in their individual and original format, you can find them in this list of all of Jim’s Bamboo Shoots submissions.