AS STATED IN the Introduction to this book, I have not attempted here a complete, exhaustive history ofISKCON, or even of book distribution in ISKCON. I have attempted to tell how, in the years of 1970 through 1974, SrIla Prabhupada and his disciples increased ISKCON book distribution. I have also attempted to describe something about ISKCON’s book publication, especially in 1975.

I had a headache all last night and my mind accompanied the physical pain with worrisome thoughts. I’d recently read the GBC resolutions and so worried about what might happen in the future. Might my present program of writing retreats be restricted by an official order? All kinds of scenarios came and went in my mind…

Here are some questions and thoughts on the enclosed pictures of your work. As you have said, you want to impel our Krsna consciousness. You said, “The pictures are meant to have a life of their own and to show that we see Krsna in all things and we think of Krsna at all times.”

The pastime described in the Eighth Canto of Srimad- Bhagavatam, where the demons and the demigods churn the milk ocean, strikes me as a metaphor for my own creative process. I hope that doesn‟t sound puffed-up, “my creative process.” Actually, all any of us can do is to speak with whatever power God has given us…

This is a devotional picture of me looking at Srlla Prabhupada. I was surprised when I drew it because I saw myself suddenly fifty-five years old—wearing glasses, my lips sunken, wrinkles—sitting in front of Prabhupada. I was only thirty-seven when he left. He has never seen me in this older body…

In the Introduction to Nimdi ddsa and the Mouse, I justified the use of fiction in Krsna conscious literature, as long as the Vaisnava parampard is kept intact, and the “rasa,” or devotional mood is in order. I do not want to repeat all that here, but I would like to at least ease my readers and myself into the present story…

I have a book of meditations for writers, called Walking on Alligators. I read the first one. It said a writer writes everyday and everyday he meets with resistance. There’s no explanation for resistance he says, it is universal. You think of things to do instead of writing, and now that I am writing I think of reasons to stop.

In the two volumes of A Poor Man Read the Bhagavatam completed so far, I regularly discuss the nature of this work. That is, that I am mixing the straight presentation of a Bhagavatam lecture with the relaxed freedom of an ordinary soul, a poor man. I do this in order to speak constantly about Krsna.

I have not written a volume of A Poor Man Reads the Bhagavatam in eight years, and I have not written at all, not even a diary, in over a year. What is bringing me back to pumping the well again? A casual browsing in my library at the volumes of A Poor Man Reads the Bhagavatam. They have an appeal because, I think if I write at all, it should be “straight” and sastric.

There’s a statement in the Bhagavad-gitd that as kings such as Janaka and others worked for Kxsna in the past, so we should also work for Krsna. Then there’s that verse, “ . .. being fully absorbed in Me and taking refuge in Me, many, many persons in the past became purified by knowledge of Me—and thus they all attained transcendental love for Me.” (Bg. 4.10)