I'm a Literary Writer (Again)

Sometime back in 2000 or 2001 I got a request from Rick Bass. He asked if I'd done any writing about the environment. He said that if I had something along those lines, he wanted to include it in a book of stories, essays, and poems that would protest, according to the introduction of Falling From Grace in Texas, "the abuses of the enviroment by developers, by legislators catering to the profiteers of agriculture and petroleum." Not being the state's best-known writer about the enviroment, I didn't have much. I did have a short poem that I'd published in a little magazine about 20 years previously, so I sent that to him and forgot about it. Imagine my surprise when the book arrived today, nearly five years after the original request.

Paul Christensen says in his introduction that the book is "perhaps not what Rick Bass expected or even wanted . . . . [It] is a more problematic and intimate response . . . ." Whatever the book is, my little poem is in it. I'm thrilled to be published in the company of Bud Shrake, Stephen Harrigan, Clay Reynolds, Olive Hershey (we shared an office back in our grad school days!), Marshall Terry, A. C. Greene, and, as they say, many others. I'll bet they're going to be surprised to see my name in the table of contents. But no more surprised than I was.