By: ANNA FRIEDRICHSEN, Lake Voice Duluth’s Eddy Gilmore lost his job last summer and it was the best thing that could have happened to him.
“I was on the treadmill of life going nowhere,” Gilmore said.
At almost 40-years-old, Gilmore was unhappy and unfulfilled after “getting pulled off the corporate teat”.
All Gilmore had was his story, so he wrote it.
As a child of a hoarder, Gilmore had a not-so-average upbringing, which plays out in his memoir titled, “The Emancipation of a Buried Man,” available here.
Gilmore self-published the memoir, which was not the simplest of tasks.
When Gilmore arrived in Duluth in 1994 to attend University of Minnesota Duluth with a history major, he was “a clueless mess”.
“I had 100 pets in my bedroom. I wasn’t ready for college, even though I was a great student,” Gilmore said.
Gilmore’s writing career did not start out of thin air. After his freshman year at college, Gilmore found himself living in a cabin with no communication to the outside world, besides the letters he wrote to friends and family.
“The world went from black and white to color. I saw all this beauty for the first time and I wasn’t ashamed of what others were thinking. I wanted to naturally write about it. It wasn’t an assignment. I loved it,” Gilmore said.
While still working in corporate America, he put in an appeal at Duluth Budgeteer News making a simple suggestion. Gilmore ended up getting a position and has been writing for the publication since.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClSKxb4C1gg&w=420&h=315]
“It’s not a very prestigious newspaper column, but people value it. It means something to some people and it means something to me,” Gilmore said.
Gilmore credits the Budgeteer for keeping him sane. He is able to write about pretty much anything, “which typically means it’s about [his] obsessions”.
“I’m just trying to write because I love it, not just writing, but choosing to live,” Gilmore said.
Gilmore tries to write every day. He lights a fire in his wood stove and has at it.
“All these ideas start exploding, that’s when it’s good writing—and it’s great. A lot of the times it can be frustrating,” Gilmore said.
When ideas no longer flow freely, Gilmore gets up and does something fulfilling, like gardening or finding someone new to talk to.
On November 24th at the Red Herring in Duluth, Gilmore, Duluth’s mayor Don Ness, and many more will be a part of a variety show with a wide selection of music.
There will be people talking about their recently published books and a few book readings. The event is mainly just to have fun and be a part of a community of artists.
At this event, and the others he does, all Gilmore hopes to get out of them is a conversation.
Gilmore’s memoir is available at UMD, Duluth Pack, Second Look Books, Amazon and more. For a detailed list of retailers in Duluth, check out the list on Gilmore’s website, located here.
“I even got a damn audiobook that I made in my closet, which was hard because of the specifications they had to approve it,” Gilmore said.
Gilmore plans on writing another book this winter and having it out early next year.
For more information on Gilmore, check out his website: http://eddygilmore.com/.
This article is the second in a series about writers in Duluth. The first article can be found here. If you are a writer or have someone in mind to be featured in an upcoming article, contact Anna Friedrichsen at fried581@d.umn.edu.