David Cowen is the current president of the Gulf
Coast Poets Society, a chapter of the Poetry Society of Texas. I mention this
foremost in his notable biography because the Friendswood Public Library has
developed a partnership with Gulf Coast Poets over the past five years; a partnership that has brought many fantastic and distinct poets to the library
for poetry readings. While each poet
brings a unique voice and vision, the one constant among the society is a
shared desire to bring quality to their craft.
Through workshops, readings, and collaborative efforts, they are
achieving their aims, and it has been a pleasure to have a front row seat
throughout the Friendswood Library’s off
the page poetry series.
I mention the many unique voices of Gulf Coast
Poets and David Cowen is no exception.
His work, as I believe he would also attest, is possibly the darkest of
the work among the Gulf Coast Poets; as he states in the interview below, he is
pulled into the horror in ordinary things. Back in January of this year, David was one
of three featured poets reading at FPL and I was fortunate to receive a copy of
his latest book, The Madness of Empty
Spaces, which made the Preliminary Ballot for the 2014
Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry. I don’t consider myself a
devotee of the gothic/horror genre but I was intrigued by his reading, and by
the title and cover of his book. The
poems revealed themselves to be much more than creatures pouncing in the night
(but there is that too). David uses
horror to discern and express the darker variations of the human condition. The
poems in this collection are often testimonies from the cursed, the guilty or
betrayed; each one a plea for redemption; for a light to shine on the dark path
of isolation or fear.
Finally I should mention that all of the photography
you see throughout the interview is the work of David Cowen. When first viewing his photographs, I was
struck by how they manage to capture the same feelings evoked through his
poetry, each enhancing the other….haunted: solitary: searching.
The following interview was conducted by email throughout
parts of April and May, 2015.
MR: Danel Olson’s introduction to your book
provides wonderful insight into your work, as when he writes, If the
keenest instinct of the Gothic impulse is to record decay, that is what these
poems do--with uncommon directness. Abandonment, fragmentation, ruin,
trammelled innocence, and someone's unsentimentalized demise are always in the
middle or at least on the edges of his verse.
I am impressed with the scope of reference in your
poems; mythology, physics, folklore...with genres in horror, Romanticism,
science fiction, fantasy, and true-crime among the forefront, and yet these
competing influences are held cohesive by what Olson refers to as the
Gothic impulse. Could you elaborate on this impulse as it relates
specifically to your work and expression?
DC: The term "Gothic" has its
original roots from the "Goths;" the "barbarians" who
continually threatened the perhaps over-fantasized rationality and order of the
Roman Empire. Going past the Victorian notions of "Gothic," leaning
towards distressed damsels in dark places or depictions of evil being overcome
by ultimate good, the modern meaning of the term has reverted to its
etymological roots.
In her book The Gothic Impulse in Contemporary
Drama (UMI Research Press 1990) Mary Beth Inverse postulates that the
"true Gothic" "pulverizes any sense of a morally operative
universe." This moral and spiritual uncertainly facing us is one of the
elements of true terror. The scholar Zugiong Ma, referred to the Gothic Impulse
as the "malignant reemergence of the 'other', i.e., alterities (alternate
realities) of the self and culture." Of course this "malignant
other" is the part of ourselves and our lives we try to repress. The
Gothic Impulse postulates the possibility of the effect of this reemerged inner
darkness on the sunlight of our normal living.
Taking that further I have always found the
tendency of much of my poetry to be pulled into what I call "The horror of
ordinary things." This is why my pieces are immersed in concrete images
seeking an emotional and maybe even visceral response from the reader. The
images are often layered. The monster at the door can be a vampire or a
drunken father, and sometimes the distinction is blurred. My Gothic Impulse
rises out of the day to day things that happen around us. While most of
my poetical themes are traditional I find myself often steering my words, like
Pazuzu at the Quija Board, diverting the verse to a darker place. There is a
disquieting beauty in noir. From the Old City Cemetery in Galveston in the fog
to the
abandoned structures in old towns that once held light, life and
mysteries. It isn't that we want to live in that darkness. We are
just fascinated with what we try to hide from ourselves. My photography
tries to capture this as well. I had a professor who opined that
photography and film reached their artistic apex with black and white.
Color film was an art yet to reach true status as an art form because it took
away the shadows. Dark poetry is still an emerging genre even though its
roots go back thousands of years - Beowulf, Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and Dante's
Inferno as examples. My hope is to further the genre.
My book is a collection of my detour from
bluebonnets and spring into something where shadow is not a byproduct but
rather the theme.
MR: This question may digress from our main
journey, but since you mention noir and film…it put me in mind of your poem Dreaming in Black and White
specifically, although other poems have similar elements…also Gothique. I was wondering while reading Dreaming in Black in White if you count the
film-noir films of the 40s and 50s as an influence or inspiration, or even
before that with the German Expressionist films of the 1910s and 20s? These
films deal in shadow…what we can’t see as much as what comes into the
light. Many of the Classic noir directors moved from Germany to
Hollywood to escape the war. They
brought their craft with them. The
visual style and mood is made to emphasize the emotions of fear and dread, a
feeling that comes across in the concrete images of your poetry and photography. Many of the German Expressionist films of the
tens and twenties are Horrors such as Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or F.W. Murnau’s great film Nosferatu from 1922. Am I stretching to
see an influence (or appreciation) in the dark shadows of these films?
from Dreaming in
Black and White:
one
street
rimmed
with broken concrete
black
blooms emerging from the cracks
caliche
driveways spilling onto asphalt
Then later the image of a Chevy:
its
chrome ornament streaking the gray field
with
the reflected memory of light from a diffused sun
from Gothique:
clothes
draped over a chair,
a
row of perfumed decanters on a dresser;
Dresden-laced
ballerinas
stoically
posing in porcelain;
the
contortions of shadow
are
only the interference
with
the sulphured glow
of
a distant street lamp
bleeding
through the imperfections
of
your window coverings
DC: I am very familiar with both of those films and
enjoyed them very much. Two others that always come to mind are from the early
works of Fritz Lang. His film “M” with Peter Lorre was the first film I saw as
a young teenager that revealed to me film as an art form and not just
entertainment. “M’s” magnificent use of black and white and the intricate
camera shots of the actors' faces amazed me. Metropolis was an amazing science fiction opera as well. However, I
can’t say that any specific film was on my mind when I wrote this piece.
Poems are often collages of many memories and
thoughts that get pasted together. This poem is that as well. The street is in
Brownsville, Texas where I grew up. It was not unusual for various teenagers to
hang out in driveways leaning on their cars. The “Black and White” theme has two origins. First, due to the hardships
of my family, and whatever other reason likely necessitating years of therapy I
judiciously avoided undertaking, many of my childhood memories come back to me
in black and white. I often dreamed in black and white when I was small. I
vividly remember one of the first color dreams I recall actually waking up with
the memory still fresh. It almost shocked me that I could actually dream in
color; later of course learning that dreaming in color is what we are supposed
to be doing. Color is now the norm for my dreams.
The other is that I was thinking of a noir style setting. The one facet of noir that many people do not even focus
on is that despite the dark overtones and shadows, you have to have light,
sometimes brilliant light, to create shadow. The references to light in this
poem are deliberate. Light makes shadow. Nightmares are dreams where the light
creates shadows. The looping dream, made more horrifying because the dreamer is
now lucid, watching but unable to control these dark events. I recall walking
down streets of Brownsville at night, the light poles set apart just enough
that each created a separate globe. Anyone entering the globe would become a
shadow when seen from a distance. The light, while seemingly a shelter from the
dark, was a false refuge. It did not keep out wind, rain or mosquitos. When you
stood in those globes on foggy days, nothing seemed to exist beyond
the edge of the glow. These are very vivid images and reinforced my desire to
project an emotional response in my readers witnessing such events through my
words.
Going back to noir
film, in The Exorcist, one
of the most powerful such scenes in my mind is when Max Von Sydow first
approaches the threshold of Regan McNeil's house. He approaches as a shadow
bathed in the light of Regan's uncovered window. In that darkness, the false
nature of light as a refuge becomes starkly apparent. The power of that image
is what I want to produce in my work.
MR: Lang’s film M
was also influential to me and it was probably from that, and then looking into
Lang’s entire filmography, that led to my appreciation of film noir and became
another piece to the puzzle of understanding film as an art form. You stated earlier that your poems “are
immersed in concrete images” and that you seek “an emotional and maybe even
visceral response from the reader.” In reading your poems I clearly see what
you mean, and these images sometimes take on, for me, a cinematic quality. You
also state that your poems are drawn toward “the horror of ordinary things.”
This put me in mind of your poem The
Travelling Salesman Finishes his Run. You have taken something very ordinary, a
salesman returning home, and turned it into something rather extraordinary,
including faster-than light speed, slugs, and unique vistas, for lack of a better word:
looking
out
at
the cerulean pearl
imbedded
with swirls of red storms
circling
a familiar bloated star
I’m not certain this classifies as a horror, but I
feel that this entire scenario is pointing toward things in your imagination…in
your creative strata, of which I am still traversing its crust. Would you consider providing some insight
into this extraordinary poem?
DC: You
had me with "extraordinary." Thank you for the kind words. This piece
is not horror, but rather speculative or science fiction poetry. I have experimented
with science fiction poetry for a few years now trying to write something that
fit the genre but also was what I believed to be a decent piece. Nothing
in genre poetry should ever get a "bye" when it comes to quality.
Genre cannot excuse a bad poem. It has to stand on its own without regard to
genre.
To reconstruct the "building" of the poem is a bit twisted. I am a
fan of South Texas Poet and Writer, Juan Manual Perez. He opened my eyes to the
potential for science fiction themes in poems. So in writing this piece it
started with two ideas -- the first a sort of slipstream image of someone going
through "warp" drive to go someplace. But since that whole thing is
cliche, the other thought was how often television or movies use this sort of
thing. Recalling the wonderful scenes in Kubrick's 2001 of the flight attendant with velcro slippers
serving passengers on a flight to the moon, it occurred to me that someone
making a trans-galactic flight, experiencing this psychedelic shift in reality,
would eventually get used to it.
Then it brought to mind that such a person would not just be the pilot, since
that would add some sort of perhaps larger than life flair to the point of
view, it needed to be a business person. Someone like a galactic Fuller brush
man. If you travel a lot for business, you hear these sales people -- always on
the phone or always telling a "war story" about some sale. My poems
are almost always telling a story of some kind, so this concept fit perfectly.
The next step was taking the slipstream element and adding in the
"ordinary." I have the man contemplating the boring nature of this
otherwise amazing event returning the mundane crackers and peanuts we all know
from flying, along with the ordinary things we are told to do when preparing to
land. So, here is this fantastic thing -- interplanetary, if not galactic
travel by way of an Alcubierre drive, a theoretical mode of transport and the
man is bored, tired and just wants to sleep in his own bed. All the promise of
the future and mankind stays the same. I made home someplace other than earth
because, of course, it is the future. Also, seeing the home planet with all its
swirls is like seeing the first road sign pointing to your hometown on the road
after being gone for many years. It sets in motion a sense of ease; "you
can relax now," "you're home."
The part of the cat are the lines I struggled with the most. Originally,
it ended right before that but I felt it was unfinished. I also thought a
touch of macabre humor might be in order. For this type of travel it may be a
few days to the traveller but could well be years for the home. Forgetting to
put the cat out means you have a real mess to clean up when you get back. Maybe
the horror is in that one link.
MR: I
think you are getting something across, in a creative way, about how much we can
take for granted. Advances in science
and technology are astounding and yet it’s easy to view these things through
our life experience primarily, not so much relative to historical or scientific
precedent. The advances themselves promote a kind of living in the moment….a
kind of speeding up and slowing down, much like your salesman: the Classic
ennui… I’m moving fast but where am I going really. Please correct me if I’m wrong here.
DC: Yes. With this particular poem,
there is also the notion that we absorb technology into that moment. It simply
becomes another way of letting us do the same thing and accomplish the same
tasks, even if in a different mode. Perhaps the major difference is the loss of
true personal interaction. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film Kairo, though technologically a bit behind the times even when
filmed, posited this dark view of this loss. In Kairo, a virus is spread through bored people accessing a forbidden
site on the Internet. It’s a very cliché premise now, but not so much when
first filmed (predating Facebook, Tinder and Skype). Besides opening the user
to potential attack from the typical long-haired psycho ghost girl, this virus
would infect an illness in the user. All joy and color would fade from their
lives. As they retreated internally, they would become more and more despondent
until finally they would simply be consumed by despair, the only remains of
their existence being an ashen shadow on the wall or floor. Kurosawa was
exploring the disaffection of humanity from itself as a result of technology.
While seeming to be a new form of expression, communication and entertainment,
Kurosawa’s view was that it actually isolated us even further in the great
urban dystopian sprawls that had already engulfed humanity. Eventually these
sprawls would become empty.
My poem Traveling Salesman perhaps takes a more positive view. Despite all
the changes, the fundamental “I” will prevail; even if in the end we are rather
mundane folk just trying to make do in life.
MR: While reading your poems I find a
common theme of movement and searching, and also of confinement…empty walls and
hallways, bolted doors or doorways being opened and shut. This searching
may be elemental to poetry in general but you have placed the search in some
very concrete, unique locations and time-periods. Poems such as The
Choice of the Last Child of Proveglia and the path seem to be prime
examples of the search in your poetry, or the title poem which I hope we
can explore later. Would you care to discuss the themes of searching and
confinement in these poems or in your poetry in general? Also, while
doing a cursory search for Proveglia I came across some information on the
island of Poveglia. Is this the setting or inspiration for the poem?
DC: Your question touches on two
themes here really. The first, the perpetual “search” is more than a journey to
find something. When you read the pieces the characters seem driven to go down
these corridors towards a certain fatalistic end. Their journey is confined.
The doors along the way may give the impression of choice, but you have no
choices when you can only find one of the doors unlocked.
Horror and dark fantasy are allegories
of ourselves and our fears of the worst of ourselves. Vampires, werewolves and
brain eating zombies are the classic addicts. If you have ever known someone
severely addicted you sense in them a fatalism. For all their talk of changing
and turning the corner, they really think the game is rigged against them. They
are going to fail because the pathway has been laid out so they have no real
choices. The traditional horror monsters are almost always forced to suppress
anything good in their nature. They eat because it is their nature to eat. No
matter how they want to change their nature in the end they consume. The worst
of them wins.
Hallway passages have always
been a classic image to me. In larger hotels the hallways seem endless. You go
down searching for your number. You have the key for one door only unless you
exit altogether. Often, if the hallway is long enough there always seems to be
patches of dark down the hall. As if somehow there was an interruption to the
flow of the path; or if somewhere down the line, the path just ceases to exist.
In Kubrick’s The Shining the
continual shots of little Danny rumbling down in his Hot Wheel were the most
visually disturbing to me. The rumble of the wheels and the relentless
stretches were a bit unnerving. You just knew that somewhere on that pathway
something bad was going to happen. Hotels are imperfect imitations of home
anyway. No matter how comfortable it isn’t home. When I travel for business it
doesn’t matter what hotel I am in, if my family isn’t there it isn’t home. I
never sleep well. The only thing I have to look forward to when finally getting
to the room is a bed some other stranger has already slept in.
.…I came across a
reference to the island of Proveglia last
year when the city of Venice decided to put the infamous island up for sale. I
read its history – literally thousands died on that island. The island was a
“lazarreto” or quarantine station. During different plagues up to 160,000
people were sent there to die. The locals, as would be expected, strongly
believe it is haunted…. After discovering the history of this island, I
wanted to write about it. The last major use of the island was as a mental
hospital of allegedly dubious character with some type of riotous end. So I
envisioned this place of death and despair where those facing the onslaught of
demons (the plague in creature form) desperately fight to survive.
MR:
In reading the Emperors of the
Grass, and to some degree Crossing
the Realms, I find myself reflecting back to Shelley’s Ozymandias. I don’t mean
this to imply mimicry, but really as a compliment in comparison to a great work
of literature. If I’m reading this right
we are speaking of a similar theme….Shelley’s is a sonnet….but both poems express
futility in the face of vanity, using a monument to expose the futility of a
hollow, boastful pride. Time will deal
with all transgressions.
what
regalia is the matted grass
under
the dripping moss;
the
warm ground searing the metal laden subterranean
thrones;
the
airless keep protecting its proud master.
Am I
correct in seeing an affinity to Ozymandias, and if so, to the larger scope of
Romantic writers and themes; writers such as Shelley, William Blake, or Edgar
Allen Poe? I’m thinking of Romanticism
in the sense of valuing intense emotion, even horror in the face of extreme rationality,
or placing intuition over reason. I
sense other affinities; you mentioned Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and The Odyssey; a
shared affinity toward heroic individualism. And also you mentioned a disquieting beauty in noir, maybe something
like the sublime found in
Romanticism. Before I spend more time on
what could be my own futile attempt to connect imaginary dots, please chime in
and set me straight.
DC: Great question and observation, but there are
no particular poems that gave rise to those poems. There is a definite romantic
theme in many of the poems. I think the book could be labeled a more modern
form of gothic romanticism. The noir
of mankind derives from his own nature erupting from the sheen of civility and
moral “high ground.” The question that comes from this is whether Man
has “fallen” because of this nature or because he has created an ideal for
himself that artificially tries to separate Man from this nature? Are we bad
because we have decided what is right and wrong and judge ourselves despite how
we were made. If we are made to be who we are, how can we be monsters for
following the natural disposition of our creation. The “monsters” of gothic
literature or horror may be the dark side of this moral struggle.
Emperors
and Realms have two different
backstories. Realms came out of a
writing exercise on a writing listserv I once belonged to. We were given the
title and asked to write around it. The title struck me as rather dark. Instead
of some flowery description of entering another time or dimension (or some
equivalent of the hereafter), memories of walking through old Christ’s Church
in Old Towne Alexandria, Virginia popped in my head when trying to write the
piece. In the churchyard are old gravestones so worn no names can be read. I
suppose the church has the record of who they put in there, but it struck me
profoundly that after some point even our very names would be forgotten.
Everything that is important to us has no importance after a time. That set the
piece off with some allusions to Greek mythology (Sisyphus -- that or struggle
for some higher purpose is like the old king rolling his stone) as well as the
dark horseman. The idea is that only the living who fear death and only the
living who suffer from the plagues and things that can bring death. Hope itself
belongs to the living. So, we have this moment; this one time to rant and rave
against anything adverse. Our job is to take it and do with what we have. We
can count on nothing else.
Emperors
came into my head starting with the first line. There are several references to
Shakespeare in the piece (e.g., “my kingdom, my kingdom). So, I wanted to
create at least a faux impression of something more traditional. For the rhythm
of the piece some of his more famous soliloquies (McBeth’s “Tomorrow and
Tomorrow” speech for example) come to mind. The poem vaguely attempts some
meter and ends with a classical couplet.
There is a mocking in this piece. Mocking the
monuments of death and the trappings put in place by those who somehow believe
the larger the stone, the more life they will salvage. So the notion of the
grass being some type of royal cloak came to my head and I worked with it. Some
of the lines were a sardonic jab at the physical reality of death itself.
These two pieces are not my favorites of the book,
but they were included because they cover the dark themes you pointed out. Ozymandias was not in the front of my
mind when I wrote this. Ozymandias
and Poe’s El Dorado have been part of
me since I first encountered them as a grade school student. They both focus on
the pride and fall of man; even the good man. The point of both these poems is
not to breed hopelessness. It’s the opposite. Ozymandias (presumably inspired
by the buried ruins of the sphinx) thought he could overpower time itself with
his great works. The Gallant Knight in El
Dorado spent his whole life trying to find and achieve some ideal or purity
of being that could never be reached. The lone hero isn’t brave because he
wins, he’s brave because he fights even if he knows that he will lose. The hero
does not forget the purpose of his journey. As with Emperors and Realms if we
get caught up in the false promise of immortality among the living, that is
living forever in this world in some way, we lose the trueness of life’s
moments. But because our own flaws, we will likely fail to see that. The
afterlife will be what it is and once we are there, I doubt we will look back.
Perhaps that was the true punishment of Lot’s wife when she looked back at her
hometown being destroyed for wickedness.
MR: Let me start my final questions by
thanking you for your time and the thoughtfulness with which you conducted the
interview. I believe your answers have provided wonderful insight into
your work. As a librarian I am always interested in promoting writers
(especially local writers) to a wider audience and I hope this format will help
in that aim. While I read all types of writing, I really value poetry as
the highest form of written expression. To do it well requires diligence
to the craft and a true love of language. As a young man, the work of
Whitman and Eliot, Jeffers and Plath, the poems of Tu Fu; these poems became a
part of me and continue to open my perspective. I think only poetry has
this power. Could you talk a little about poetry today. It’s cultural
relevance in a world moving at hyper speed; a world maybe moving toward a more
visual expression.
DC: You are very welcome. I want to thank you
and the folks at the Friendswood Library for the support you all provide
to local artists. Houston has a huge and diverse poetry scene. Reading venues
exist throughout the city. Writers I have met from the East Coast speak
enviously of the many avenues for poets to read. Nationally, more people make a
living from poetry than perhaps in any generation in history. MFA programs
produce teachers who go out and teach, hold workshops and readings. Students
take the classes so they also can earn MFAs and hope to teach or workshop.
The advent of Create Space and similar services has spawned a huge number
of small "kitchen presses" that literally involve publishers working
at night in their kitchens to edit and publish books through ebook and print on
demand services.
Even so, poets I know often ask aloud the same
question, "What purpose is it if the same people always come to their
readings?" Put another way, "Is poetry a living art when the
only audience for poetry appears to be fellow poets." In the days of the
Medici's and nobility it was considered the duty of the nobility to sponsor
art. Much later, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Elliot and Dylan Thomas could fill large
lecture halls with paying audiences. Poe scraped a living from publishing poems
in newspapers. Others did very well publishing regularly in gazettes and
magazines. Imagine the Houston Chronicle having a literature section, much less
paying a poet for work. Horror publications, thanks to the Horror Writers
Association's efforts, are the few who will pay for poetry. You cannot live on
such payments as maybe in the past. I once figured that for the going rate,
even in horror, I'd have to publish over 5,000 poems a year to make a modest
living. Somehow poets did it long ago. Shakespeare as we know wrote for the
common man and was rewarded for it.
This was, of course, before television took root,
and of course, it's electronic progeny cable, wifi, and smart phones. The
entire world at your fingertips and yet we are more alone and less literate than
any generation in history.
I recently read a study paid for with federal
money that less than 8% of the general public said they had read poetry on any
regular or even irregular basis. If you look at the bios of college or major
publications you see two major trends -- the poets come from academic
backgrounds and you have never heard of any of them unless you run in their
small circles. As active as the Houston Poetry Scene and those in other cities
have become, the academic poetry world still dominates this very narrow field.
This means that the local poets, no matter how well liked they are among their
peers, are essentially ignored by a predilection for the academics to only
publish their own. By doing so poetry is farther removed from the broad audience
it once seemed to enjoy. I wonder where poetry will be 50 years from now? Will
poets be reduced to the lonely practitioners of a forgotten religion; relegated
to empty ceremonies honoring their long dead gods?
MR: And finally, in getting to know an artist I
think it is helpful to know what inspires them. Could you share some of
your favorite artists (be it poets or otherwise), and maybe mention a few
things about their work that inspires or influences you. Thanks once again for your participation.
DC: You are very welcome. For me inspiration is
wide and far reaching. I suppose growing up poor with a large family, an
alcoholic father who died when I was very young the same week our house burned
down and a mother who stoically persevered was an inspiration. My poetry
reflects a grittiness that comes from the world I was raised in. My mother was
an English teacher and brought home records of poets and I would listen to them
over and over. I discovered Poe, Sandburg, Auden, Frost, Pound, Thomas and
Elliot through these. Listening to these voices made me want to emulate them;
to put into words something that moved the reader. I also loved Whitman
and Stephen Crane. The poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Gwendolyn
Brooks brought me to see the struggles of others and the nobility of hope
despite the daily despair of so many.
But anyone in my generation who denies that they
were influenced by rock and folk poets is simply trying to be falsely
pretentious. Bob Dylan was righteous. He spoke of haunted frightened trees; of
electricity howling through the bones; of dancing beneath the diamond sky.
Paul Simon told me that the angst and introspection I was living was shared by
many. Kris Kristofferson amazed me with Casey's Last Ride and Jesus Was A
Capricorn. Springsteen sang poetry of the streets and Bernie Taupin's lyrics
stirred me. And who didn't have chills when you first heard "Breathe deep
the gathering gloom" in the Moody Blues' Nights in White Satin.
These poets made me want to express my thoughts in poetical form
and to touch my readers with my word as they had.
Later, in college, SHSU Dr. Paul Ruffin, later to
become a Texas Poet Laureate, taught me how to collect the emotions I felt and
put them down in a flowing, living piece. He introduced me to Galway Kinnell --
literally and personally at Ruffin's house-- before he won his Pulitzer, where
I was able to ask him if The Bear was
based on his own experiences (it was not). I met Donald Justice, before his
first Pulitzer. I got to pick Larry McMurtry's brain at a dinner party after a
reading of his books. All of these experiences and writers molded me. In
the end it was the simple "make do with what you have" Missouri
wisdom of my mother that has molded me the most. She instilled in me an eye for
the practical and taught me to cherish the wonder of everything around me.
Nothing is common. Everything and everyone has a story.
