By Meghan Peters

Since graduating from the UW in 1979, Scott MacFarlane has transformed from a long-haired and free-spirited traveler to a slightly balding and successful writer and scholar.

But if you’re talking about spreading the ethos of peace and love, he still considers himself a hippie.

Fascinated by the era of peace signs, Woodstock and experimental drugs, MacFarlane wrote “The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture,” (2007). The book discusses 15 literary works from 1962 through 1976 and how they reflect the period.

“People look at the 60s and are immediately attracted to the music – but nobody had looked at the literature,” MacFarlane said. “I look at how literature moved from Beat writing to Postmodern.”

Novels such as “Siddhartha,” “Stranger in a Strange Land” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” made the cut on MacFarlane’s analysis list. He said these works made the most sense to include, and he was pleased with the selection.

He is also happy with the responses he has received about the book. Margaret Bikman, a book critic for The Bellingham Herald, named it one of her top five picks for 2007.

“Maybe it’s the nostalgia — more likely it’s the great writing of authors like Tom Robbins, Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey — but this book made me want to go down to my basement and re-read the tomes of my college days,” Bikman wrote of MacFarlane’s work.

The project started out as a 50-page thesis paper for MacFarlane’s master’s in creative writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles. After meeting publishers at a conference, he submitted a proposal for the book — and McFarland Publishing bit.

MacFarlane used his thesis paper as an outline for the book, which he said took him about six months to write.

Some of the author’s interest in prose of the hippie era came from communication classes he took at the UW. He said he remembers discussing the transformation of journalism from a formulaic and informative practice to a more radical and narrative style with professors Roger Simpson and Don Pember.

“There was a tension between the mainstream and the counterculture,” MacFarlane said. “The compromise is a Postmodern society that’s more hip — but more authoritarian, too.”

He cited the environmentally conscious Whole Foods and attitudes toward the military as aspects of the alternative society that made their way into the mainstream.

Though many consider today’s college-age generation apathetic, MacFarlane said the level of outrage among today’s youth would be “a quantum level higher” than the hippie era if there was a draft.

Before MacFarlane analyzed the hippie era, he lived it. After graduation, he, his wife and their three-year-old son traveled throughout the country in a Volkswagen bus. They spent time painting faces in New Orleans and trying to create a greeting card company.

In 1982, he scored a role as a member of Richard Gere’s platoon in “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

He and his family lived in New York for five years and later moved to the Columbia River Gorge in The Dalles, Ore., where they stayed for 11 years. There MacFarlane worked as the first director of the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center, a historical museum established in the 1990s.

Since the release of “The Hippie Narrative,” the author has been attending academic conferences and researching and writing for his next work. He said his new book will focus on a similar theme, but will be more mainstream than scholarly.

MacFarlane lives in the Skagit Valley, where he works as a realtor.