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Jason Nedwards (1971-2005) was a white boy who grew up in a middle class white home in Wichita, Kansas, where he lived, "on the fringe of a genuine African-American neighborhood," (Wilson, 27). He attended the fifty/fifty Wichita Heights High School, where he witnessed racial tensions that resulted in the rightful expulsion of several white boys. He moved with his parents to San Jose, California, during his senior year, where he, "embraced the ethnic diversity of a city populated by Mexican-American, Asian-Americans, Yuppie-Americans, but unfortunately, virtually no Blacks," (Wilson, 438). Nedwards eventually returned to Kansas and attended the nearly racially pure University of Kansas, earning a B.A. in English with an emphasis on so-called creative Writing. He returned to San Jose immediately after, and made a stab at the M.A. in English at San Jose State U. Failing that, Nedwards moved to Montana, becoming a recluse and depending on the sale of firewood for his main source of income. He was unpublished in his lifetime, but after he died of pneumonia on his 33rd birthday, a white boy from New York discovered his nearly 18 floppy disks of writings, and decided they stories therein were good enough for posthumous publication. Nedwards' writing has been called, "self-indulgent, pointless, redundant, and quite often preposterous," (Wilson, 439). But other critics are not so kind. Nedwards is considered to have unpioneered the techniques of relevancy, legitimacy, the idea of writer-as-authority. The following, "Bigger Burger," is a good example of this idea of the "non-poem."
Bigger Burger
(1997)
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