BRATTLEBORO — Doug “Ten” Rose has made writing his memoirs a three-dimensional project.
His new book, Fearless Puppy on American Road, chronicles 35 years of hitchhiking beginning when he left Coney Island at age 15. Rose, now living in Brattleboro, intertwines accounts of his experiences with the extraordinary people he met on the road with his personal philosophies and adaptations of Eastern spiritual ideas into his own life and language.
“I have attended eight different colleges and universities,” Rose writes in his foreword. “I've learned more in other people's cars.”
“If you put the writings of Kerouac, Chopra, Hunter S. Thompson, Castaneda, Black Elk, Will Rogers, Gandhi, and a clown, in a blender with 500 lbs. of additional hallucinogens and a time machine, you would have the writings of Doug Rose,” his Web site, www.fearlesspuppy.org, claims.
This is not your typical book.
“I'm not a writer,” the easy and pleasant Rose says, laughing. “I'm still surprised that people are responding to the work as a book.… I thought they'd be excited about the project, but I didn't know they'd like reading it so much.”
Besides being an entertaining and exciting read, Fearless Puppy on the American Road is intended to raise money for those who have helped him the most: “wisdom teachers of any kind, but especially the monks and nuns who really saved me,” Rose says. “If it weren't for them, I'd have been in a really bad way.”
Choosing a grassroots approach to publishing, Rose supplies buyers directly with his book, be they retailers or the general public. The middleman thus eliminated, he is free to donate more of his proceeds toward building Western-style accommodations near Asian temples, enticing a Western population of travelers year-round to visit these teachers.
The money raised from short-term travelers will in turn be used to support those studying to be monks and nuns. The guesthouses will also boost the local economy and retain local employees.
“I really hope it takes off,” Rose says. “To try to set up a program like this here in America would cost so much... but over there you can build a couple of guesthouses for not a lot and get people over there.”
To this end, Rose is interested in creative, social means of marketing and distribution.
Staging a number of readings and small benefits to sell books and raise additional money, Rose is hooking directly into the community and raising potential investors' interest in himself, his book, and his cause all at once.
Rose has lined up not only bookstores, but other, less traditional, retail settings like groceries and bagel shops to sell the book, illustrating his desire to engage readers on a level that moves beyond reading into the rest of their lives.
At a recent reading and signing at the Book Cellar on Main Street, the handsome Rose reads easily to a group of three women and a child.
“I'm trying hard to find G-rated chapters here for the kid,” he says with a smile, leafing through the 444-page book.
He manages to find three appropriate chapters, with only a word substitution here and there. The girl listens, eating Oreos and staring at the author. She eventually leaves with her mother, so Ten moves on to more R-rated chapters.
Rose says people ask him why he doesn't just become a monk.
“I tell them: for one thing, I'm a drunken whore,” he says with a grin. “But no, really, if I was a monk I could help some people... but if I do this, I can help a whole lot of people who will end up helping a whole lot of other people.”
Rose leaves the reading to go to a benefit at the Mole's Eye for the Citizens Awareness Network, a regional anti-nuclear-power advocacy group, another pet cause. There, he read and sold his book amid live music and speeches (and beer), donating $5 dollars from each copy sold to the Network.
In April, Rose will host similar readings at Village Square Booksellers in Bellows Falls, in Morrisville, in Hanover, N.H., and at the Tibet House in Manhattan.
“I am so grateful to everyone in Brattleboro, for being so wonderful to me... for putting up with my inexperience,” Rose says. “I've organized projects before, but I don't know anything about book publishing or anything.”
Rose certainly does have experience organizing projects: in the back of the book, published unashamedly from original news clippings and documents, he reproduces news stories about him from over the years when he was homeless, yet managed for years to help others while having little himself.
A young Rose smiles out from articles about Massachusetts for Africa Month, which he organized for famine relief in Africa, and from an orphanage in Mexico he helped rebuild.
Rose wore a cardboard box for two years, to raise awareness and money for the homeless. A clipping from the Congressional Record documents Senator John Kerry presenting Ten's Africa Month to the President. The appendix also includes commendations from the Giraffe Society, Save the Children, and Greenpeace.
“Well, I think I hear the bartender calling me,” Rose says with a grin, and the tall, “luckiest homeless man in the world,” moves off to sell his book, network, make money for the causes he loves, and have a beer.