Rocky Leplin Rhymes with Everything

Our long-standing tradition of giving a member the mic before our keynote speaker helps us get to know what our colleagues are working on. Our 5+5+5 guidelines (5 minutes of backstory, 5 minutes to read, and 5 minutes of Q&A) help emerging writers polish their professional skills.

Rocky Leplin will be in the Member Spotlight before our January speaker, Mel Lee Smith. 

Author, poet, composer, and publisher Rocky Leplin is the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, and comes from a long line of creative geniuses. He has written 500 songs, nine books, and two musicals, and created three films. His zany manual, A Psycho’s Guide to Animal Companionship was a Finalist in the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, his short story The Incredible Man-Eating Marshmallow, was a winner of the 2020 Writer’s Digest Writing Contest, and The Tumultuous Tire Revolution was a Finalist in the 2024 Next Generation Short Story Awards. One of Leplin’s prized possessions is a 2020 note from Tom Robbins, who wrote to Rocky, saying “I salute you, and the little green man who obviously lives under your bed.” Another is a postcard from Ursula LeGuin, which you can see on his website. Another creative effort for Rocky was curating a website for his illustrious father, Emanuel Leplin. His latest book, Never Kiss a Crocodile, Never Kiss a Skunk, is out this month from Lost Whale Press. Check it out if you’re a fan of rhymed poetry about ominous animals, or know a young person who needs fresh weird animal facts for their expanding brains!

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NOTE: Rocky Leplin has shared his unique poetry and prose at many of our readings, from the Hayward Lit Hop to our Annual Book Launch. You can easily recognize him by his lanky and lovable support canine, Jasper, who would write a book about the next treats if he knew how to type.

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Read an Excerpt from forthcoming The Japanese Man With the Ring in His Nose.

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A second-generation San Franciscan, Rocky Leplin graduated from the UCLA Film Division, and earned a master’s in music composition from Oregon State. Down in La La Land, he temped at Universal, Paramount, and Walt Disney Studios. While walking his dog April over a period ten years, he wrote the rhymed verse epic Humphrey’s Long Journey Away from the Sea, inspired by a whale known as Humphrey who had gotten lost in the Sacramento River Delta. This also inspired the name of his publishing company, Lost Whale Press. Another ten years were spent writing the off-world musical, The Purpose of the Moon. You can listen to his music (which compares to post-Monkee Michael Nesmith in this fan’s opinion), on Soundcloud and Spotify. In the East Bay, Rocky worked at UC Berkeley and was the music reviewer for a chain of five weekly newspapers. A true animal lover, Rocky also boards dogs at Rocky’s Rover Roadhouse. 

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You can hear many of Rocky’s songs, order his books, and read his short stories, such as The Incredible Man-Eating Marshmallow (a winner of the 2020 Writer’s Digest Writing Contest) on his website, rockyleplin.live.

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And now some questions!

What other writers inspire you?

I’ve been inspired my whole life by authors who view the world from a weirdly comic angle. Sometimes a book, or any great work of art, can take you not just to where you’ve never been before, but it can change your consciousness, so that you think in ways that had never occurred to you, and you get the sensation that you’ve been missing something important. Yes, this can even happen without psychedelics! It happened to a lot of people, including me, when we read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, published when I was 16, Richard Brautigan’s first novel, Trout Fishing in America, which was published when I was 17, William Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man, published when I was 27, Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, published when I was 29, and the novels of William Kotzwinkle, Carl Hiaasen, and Christopher Moore, whose novel Fluke, or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings I’m reading now. Reading these novels inspired me to write the fantasy novels Ellis in Imaginedland, and The Japanese Man With the Ring in His Nose (about a Japanese businessman who wants to start a chain of sashimi and chips restaurants in America), and my fifth novel, unnamed, which I lost just when a brontosaurus was singing Jingle Bells in winter snow.

How would you like to network with other writers? 

I would like to meet writers who:

1. have written in rhymed verse, my specialty, especially if it’s funny.
2. are interested in fish. I have had an aquarium for ten years, but I’m almost a beginner in the life aquatic. I thirst for a real-time association with any writer who gets some of their inspiration from having fish, and maintaining an aquarium.
3. are classical music aficionados. My father was a composer who studied with Darius Milhaud, who at the time was the most popular composer in France, and conducting with the great Pierre Monteux, the man who conducted the riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. He called E. Leplin “my star student.” Seven of dad’s pieces were premiered by the San Francisco Symphony, including his first two symphonies. I’m always interested in sharing finds of good, little known composers of music that employs plentiful chromatic alteration, yet produces satisfying effects (which is never a given!).

Can you tell us a little more about your father?

My father, Emanuel Leplin, born in San Francisco in 1917, was a composer, conductor, painter, and veteran of the string section of the San Francisco Symphony. SFS premiered his Symphony #1 and Symphony #2 in the 1960s. (The musicians liked the opening passages of Symphony #2 Mvt 3 so much they asked him to put in repeat symbols…and played them twice!) Emanuel was stricken by polio and paralyzed, at the age of 36. He composed all of his symphonies and most of his chamber music with the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. He can be seen here, painting with a brush in his teeth. He was so illustrious and well known in the Bay Area, but so many articles about him included egregious mistakes! 

Is Rocky your real name?

That depends on what you mean by real. I’m still known as Sheldon, my birth name, on the East Coast, but have been known as Rocky since long before Sylvester Stallone. At a day camp at age 7, I won a boxing match, and everyone called me Rocky Marshmallow after the boxer in the headlines, Rocky Marciano, on which they based the movies. But I was Rocky first!

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Thanks, Rocky, for opening for Mel Lee Smith’s talk about productivity tools for writers, especially Notion!