Thanks to a grandfather who loved Shakespeare and classical music, and even greater thanks to my soft-voiced mother, who read poems and stories to her sons every evening at bedtime, I have had a love affair with the spoken and written word ever since I can remember.

As a youngster, my two greatest loves were the outdoors and books.  I wanted to be an explorer and learn about wild creatures in the wilderness where they lived, and then write about my adventures and what I had learned.  In high school I came upon a collection of essays my father had studied while a cadet at West Point.  When I read John Muir’s “A Windstorm in a Forest” I knew I had found a model for the life I wanted to live.

At that time my English teachers were giving me encouragement, though their praise was a two-edged sword since it alienated me from my classmates.  But anti-intellectualism has never been a stranger to American society, and every teacher needs a pet!  Being proclaimed valedictorian only made matters better, or worse, depending upon one’s point of view, but the lack of peer support only encouraged me to do better.

A tour of duty in the U.S. Army of Occupation took me to Honshu and the temptations of adult life, which I avoided by reading all the great Russian novels while waiting for the phone to ring.  The provisions of the G.I. Bill propelled me into Stanford, where Wallace Stegner complimented me on a critical essay and Ivor Winters introduced me to English plain style.  My labors were rewarded when I earned a B.A. in Creative Writing with Great Distinction and was elected to the Stanford Chapter of Phi Beta Kapa.

An Arthur A. Newhouse Scholarship enabled me to continue on at Stanford and work for a Masters in American Literature.  Professor Winters approved of the thesis that I wrote over the Christmas break–a comparison of the plain style prose of John Muir with the poetic lyricism of Henry Thoreau’s Walden.

Then it was off to the University of Michigan on a two-year Fellowship. Here I fell for my first wife, Lee Timblin, by putting my arm around her waist while demonstrating the difference between an Austrian Landler and a Swedish hambo.  She had an ABD (all but the dissertation) in Comparative Literature, but abandoned it for the pleasure of my company and the delights of maternity.  With the successful defense of my dissertation, “The Nature Essay as a Literary Genre”, I was on my own in the land of Academe, but landed close to Lee’s childhood home in the Windy City, where I taught Northwestern University freshmen and sophomores how not to write English.

With a young son and a contract to direct the Undergraduate Program in Creative Writing at what was then Arizona State College at Flagstaff, we took a scenic streamliner from the super-civilized city to the wild west and the scenic wonders of the Grand Canyon State.

As ASC morphed into NAU, I undertook the discipline of writing a weekly column, “Northland Nature”, which ran for eleven years and added literary naturalist to my roles as teacher, critic, poet, short story writer, book reviewer, and mentor to aspiring young writers.

Sadly, though Lee earned five more Degrees in Mothering to her resume and, with her bairns and her husband, challenged the canyons, cinder cones, and mountains of the Southwest, all too soon a brain tumor closed the last chapters of her life and she melted away in my arms.

In finding another soul mate, a canny colonial lass from South Africa, I fulfilled my promise to Lee, and we are now embarked upon a new voyage into the world of nature and the written word.