To My Sons: On Being a Writer in the TwentyFirst Century: The Crosscut Literary Awards
1968
To try and explain, Joey and Anton, both now in your twenties and still “my
boys,” how recalling a small event in my life when I was your age had an
everlasting impact on my life . . . well, I guess that’s why I'm a writer and words
usually fail me. I guess too that that’s why you Joey, with the keen mind and
sensitivity of a writer, imploring me to do something else in my lifetime, never
write down anything that's personal, and maybe too why you Anton, with your
anger pulling at your deep love for the world, call me from the university and
read me your poems.
There was a time, when I was just twenty or so, when I loved poetry more
than anything else in the world —although I loved June, your mother, who came
for one year to Wisconsin when I transferred there from a junior college in my
hometown (she went back to get her degree in my senior year -- the year I am
writing about.) and I loved riding my motorcycle too, my green and cream
Triumph 500, which I had packed and shipped to me from the east coast that
year. My father had died two years earlier, and I know those words fail me,
because I’ve tried but can’t quite express how much I loved and missed him,
with his warmth and intelligence, his disappointment with his own life as a shoe
factory worker, and his kindness that was, along with his smile, a thing of
beauty.
I chose Wisconsin University’s branch in Superior, despite its penetrating
cold weather, because someone, I don’t remember who, said the English
department there hired some writers from the University of Iowa’s graduate
writing program. The other reason was that the school did not charge extra for
out-of-state students, so despite the fact that I had little money and was living
with my mother in upstate New York, who also worked in a shoe factory, I
could afford it. I mention these details, sons, because I want you to know that
even at that young age, there were important decisions to be made, and no one
was there to make them for me -- or for your mother, who became pregnant by
me the year earlier, and together, without anyone knowing it, made plans for her
to go to Philadelphia to a Catholic home for unwed mothers to have the baby
safely and have our little girl (