The 30 writers who sign up for a workshop with the 1970s and ‘80s counterculture icon Tom Robbins at the San Miguel summer literary festival might only write one sentence.

Robbins, who is calling the session on August 20 “Teaching a Sentence to Sing,” told an interviewer why he only writes a novel every four to six years: “I try never to leave a sentence until it’s as perfect as I can make it. So there isn’t a word in any of my books that hasn’t been gone over 40 times.”

Author Tom Robbins is the keynote speaker at the San Miguel summer literary festival, and will focus on the value of every single word.

His second book, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, was his most popular. Published in 1976, it sold 1.3 million copies within four years. Later made into a movie, it tells the story of Sissy Hankshaw, a beautiful woman who learns to live with her socially unacceptable, oversized thumbs by becoming the best hitchhiker in the country.

Ending up at a South Dakota ranch run by cowgirl feminists, she discovers the path to wisdom with the help of a Japanese hermit. The book mirrored the 1970s disillusionment with America’s materialist and patriarchal society, with Sissy deciding that Americans must reach back to their spiritual roots in Pantheism, which is characterized by feminine receptivity rather than masculine aggression.

The theme of Robbins latest book, due out next February, won’t surprise his fans.

The publisher, Harper Collins, said “B is for Beer” is a 128-page “hallucogenic hymn to beer, children and the cosmic mysteries that sustain us all.”

This will be his first all-fiction work since “Villa Incognito” in 2003. Although begun nearly a year before 9/11, Robbins said, “the knowledge that such an event was inevitable obviously lay napping somewhere in the basement of the text. When 9/11 occurred, it slid up the stairs and into the narrative as effortlessly as an amoeba sliding up a soda.”

His last book was “Wild Ducks Flying Backward,” a collection of non-fiction essays, reviews, and short stories published in 2005. He also wrote five other books.

For Robbins, now 72, one reviewer said “critiquing the culture he lives in is not a fad but his life’s work. His goal as a writer is to help change human consciousness. ‘We are in this life to enlarge the soul and light up the brain,’ he has written.”

Unlike authors such as Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway, Robbins said, he doesn’t believe in writing about himself. “Where the reader needs to surrender totally to the reality of an imaginary universe, author biography is too often a mood-altering nuisance. That’s why I’m pleased that all records of my past have been destroyed by my enemies in the Norwegian secret service.”

Robbins will give the festival’s keynote address August 19, “Language is not the Frosting, It’s the Cake.”  He will share the stage August 21 with his editor, Alan Rinzler, at a meeting of the San Miguel book Club.

For more details, consult http://www.sanmiguelauthors.com/augusttomrobbins.html.