Education Anoka High School, 1960. B.A. in English, University of Minnesota, 1966. In The Sunnyvale Star , a newspaper that I began by myself when I was eleven. Last Book Read Flesh Wounds , by Mick Cochrane. Writing Habits Get up early, make coffee, write.
Writers are journalists before they're anything else.
You keep coming back to journalism, which is continually hard work, to describe action, to narrate a sequence of events and somehow keep your own fine sensibility out of it, to simply say how the game progressed. In all the best poems you find precise reporting, and this has very little to do with the mood of the writer. You can write comedy when you're sick, when you're lonely as a barn owl and your head hurts and your friends are mad at you. It's just work, that's all, and you go do it if you need to. It's a good life being a writer.