For those of you reluctant to read more because you have learned I am a Professor, let me assure you I do not fit the stereotype. I feel compelled to begin this way because I have found that once people learn that I have been in the academic world they lose interest in getting to know me, assuming I know nothing about “the real world.” They also expect to encounter a lot of highfalutin’ pretense.
Nothing could be further from the truth. While I have respectable academic credentials, I began life on a farm in rural Wisconsin. A primitive life by modern standards; wood stove for heat, no indoor plumbing, two-seater outhouse, pig pen, chicken coop, milk cows and modest crops to weed by hand. It was my grandparents’ farm. I lived there because my mother died when I was two and my father couldn’t care for me by himself. I was eventually adopted by an uncle who had a small plumbing business. By the time I started high school I was doing a man’s work. I dug ditches, laid cast-iron soil pipe, soldered copper water lines and cut and threaded a lot of galvanized pipe. Those were the days before plastic was used for everything. I also drove a number of water wells.
I was fortunate enough to get financial support to attend college at the University of Wisconsin where I was on the freshman football team. This was in 1961. The following year my application for the Peace Corps was accepted and I served two years in the Dominican Republic after Outward Bound physical training in the mountains of Puerto Rico. While I worked on a number of projects in remote villages, I was trained as a member of a well-drilling crew.
After I returned to the States I finished my undergraduate education and applied for and obtained competitive fellowships to complete my M.A. and Ph.D. So my journey has encompassed the life of a farm boy, blue-collar worker, Peace Corps Volunteer and finally a teacher/scholar. I have also been an academic administrator, husband, father, grandfather and mentor to several generations of young people.
From my days on the farm, fishing for brook trout in McDill Creek I have been an outdoorsman. I have been a lover of streams and rivers, mountains and woodlands, where I have cultivated a spiritual life in concert with the natural world. My book, Water Like the Soul of an Angel is my spiritual autobiography. The poems you find here are accessible to everyone whose life experiences have played out in “the real world.”
Some final notes: I must confess to some trepidation regarding this whole website/blog initiative. I am only marginally computer literate. I began my academic career in the era of typewriters and white-out. So this is a new phase in my life upon which I now embark, ironically, during the last stage of my chronological existence since I recently turned seventy. I am not being morbid about it, I merely appreciate the irony. The other source of trepidation is that this new phase of my existence requires I make a presumption I am reluctant to make: that my modest publications and equally modest personal history merit attention in the vast alternative universe of the internet. However, context is everything. I will join the company of countless purveyors of utter nonsense bordering on lunacy and seem reasonably sane by comparison.
As you progress through this website feel free to comment on any of the books, my discussion of the books, new poems, and of course, my relative sanity.
