Jack Kerouac reading to be held in Dreamers Garden on Sunday, Dec. 14

Press release from Maria Huff Edwards

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – A reading of “Tristessa” will be held from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on December 14 at Dreamers Garden in remembrance of Dr. William Thomas Hawkins, Sr. (1942-2025), Jeffrey P. Shapiro (1950-2025), and Anne Haisley (1940-2025).

This reading at Dreamers Garden — the Grove Street Neighborhood Community Garden — is the conclusion of the Grove Street Festival, an event that this year took place two weeks earlier on Saturday, November 29.  

This year marks the 26^th anniversary of CONTINUOUS ANNUAL READINGS of JACK KEROUAC in the GROVE STREET NEIGHBORHOOD. The readings have taken place in Dreamers Garden since the garden first opened its gates to the community in 2002. These readings arose from the visionary collaboration between Maria Huff Edwards and Ian Schleifer, starting with a series of “full moon readings” in the mid-1990s, advertised through flyers posted in various locations around town, including Anne and Phil Haisley’s Books Inc. and its Book Lovers Café, a vegetarian café managed by Ian for Anne and Phil Haisley.  

We chose Jack Kerouac’s TRISTESSA for this year’s reading echoing the first reading of TRISTESSA on Saturday, December 2, 2006, starting at noon and where the participants sat around the Magnolia grandiflora that graces Dreamers Garden.  For that reading, Ian invited several of his poet friends, including a friend who played his guitar during the reading. Thus, TRISTESSA connects Dreamers Garden to Anne Haisley’s life, whose Books Inc. flyers for many years alerted the greater Gainesville poetic community of these bohemian readings.  

This year’s reading is also dedicated to Jeffrey P. Shapiro, who often participated in the Anne Frank Readings in Dreamers Garden by playing his clarinet for these occasions. The reading also remembers Dr. William Thomas Hawkins, Sr., whose son, Matt Hawkins, is spiritually connected to the neighborhood from the years when, as a very young artist and muralist and a member of the then-active Mural Committee of Keep Alachua County Beautiful, promised to paint a mural celebrating the life of Mr. Robert Love, the manager of Mr. George’s Ice House, a historic building in the Grove Street Neighborhood — now Cypress & Grove Brewing Company, and which mural — we keep our fingers crossed — will come to pass in a not-too-distant future.   

The connection of Dreamers Garden to the Beat Generation is through Maria Huff Edwards, Founder of Dreamers Garden, who in June 1984 attended a workshop to study with American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) at the Atlantic Center for the Performing Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The two other Beat artists in residence then were Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker Robert Frank (1924-2019) and legendary American drummer Elvin Ray Jones (1927-2004). 

The Kerouac readings in the Grove Street Neighborhood started with an earlier collaboration between Maria and Ian Schleifer of impromptu “full moon readings” around the historic inner city Grove Street Neighborhood in the mid-1990s. Ian was a responsible and dedicated organizer who would faithfully reach out to local poets and poetry lovers for these grassroots events. He proved to be the best partner and most conscientious organizer and participant of the Jack Kerouac Readings in the Grove Street Neighborhood for more than a decade.  

TRISTESSA is one of the “Road Novels” that Jack Kerouac wrote between 1957 and 1960. It recounts an experience he had with a young prostitute in Mexico City. It is short, and it reflects Kerouac’s constant search for spiritual meaning in the midst of squalor, pain, suffering, and addiction.