In the summer of 1992 I walked out of the Kinko’s in Columbia, South Carolina, with a box full of books.  The box contained the first book I had ever published.  It was, oddly, a book on religious art.  Yet…

I was still in Columbia in the spring of 1992.  Sitting on my porch, I read a story by Mark Twain.  In it the greatest writer who had ever existed was never published, and his scripts were locked away in…

I crouched up in the mountain stream that overlooked Sidney Park. In the southern heat, it was cooler up by the water.  I had moved to moved to Columbia, South Carolina in 1991.  Suddenly, I pulled out the script for…

I traveled down to Monroe Harbor to write.  It was summer 1988, and I lived in Chicago.  Listening to the boats clank, I lay on the slope above Lake Michigan.  I pulled out the script of Ceremonies.  It was the…

I trudged down the country road about 10 PM.  It was summer 1985, and I was at a conference in Pennsylvania.  A bonfire was being held, and I thought that might be fun to go to.  It was located some…

I wandered around in the old Woodstock Library.  It was fall 1983.  I found an old paperback named The Pillow Book.  The writer was Sei Shonagōn, a woman of the court of Japan about 1000 AD.  Ivan Morris had translated…

At Northern Illinois University, in Founders Memorial Library, on the top floor, on the north side, I sifted through Ceremonies.  Then I sat, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows into the night.  Later, I walked down to the Private Collections Room. …

Driving back from Rockford Library, skimming around the curves on Marengo Road, I thought about Ceremonies.  It was late summer, 1974.   A fair amount of material had piled up.  I kept the pieces in the order I wrote them.  There…

On break, I curled up on a pile of boxes and read from my Mentor Book of Major American Poets.  That winter I was working in a plastics factory.  I also pondered the kinds of entries I was writing for…

Some months later, I sat on the bridge over the Kishwaukee River again.  It was the end of summer.  Cicadas buzzed.  The sky was a bit overcast. I had been creating pieces for Ceremonies at random.  A sentence, a paragraph,…