The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Poem: "Cottonwoods" by Phebe Hanson, from Why Still Dance. © Nodin Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Cottonwoods

In the cottonwood grove
behind Dahl's farm
the eyes of rustling cars
stare at me before
I crawl into them,
pretend I am driving;
power flows from the wheels,
I believe I am in control;
forget my mother's heart
lies fading in a little bedroom
beyond the rows of corn.

They have sent me away
from her dying
to play in the grove,
to whisper into the ears of corn
towering above me
as I sit between the rows
reading her letters
which say she misses me,
even though it is quieter without me
and my brother fighting.
He has brought her a goldfish
from the little pond
beside the pergola house
and laid it on her stomach.

Years later I return to the grove,
where the cottonwood trees
have grown scrawny,
but the old cars are still there,
their eyes stare at me,
unseeing and dead.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet and children's author Naomi Shihab Nye, (books by this author) born in St. Louis, Missouri (1952). She has published several books of poetry, including 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002) and Hugging the Jukebox (1982).

She said, "Since my father was Palestinian, from Jerusalem, and my mother was American, our house in St. Louis held rich fragrances of cardamom, garlic, and olive oil. "Shihab" means shooting star in Arabic. I liked that. Languages danced together in our rooms and interesting people drifted through our doors. I used to think, 'We're still waiting for a dull moment.'"

It's the birthday of Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, (books by this author) born Jean-Louis Kerouac, in Lowell Massachusetts (1922). He grew up speaking French, and couldn't speak English fluently until junior high. He was a football star in high school and got an athletic scholarship to Columbia University. It was there that he became friends with Allen Ginsberg.

In 1951 he sat at his kitchen table, taped sheets of Chinese art paper together to make a long roll, and wrote the story of the cross-country road trips he took with Neal Cassady. It had no paragraphs and very little punctuation and Allen Ginsberg called it ''a magnificent single paragraph several blocks long, rolling, like the road itself.'' And that became Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957).

It's the birthday of the writer and editor Dave Eggers, (books by this author) born in Boston (1970). He grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois, a city that was famous when he was growing up for having been the setting for the movie Ordinary People. He originally wanted to be a cartoonist, but when he was in grade school, he worked on a project where he had to write and illustrate his own book. He found that he loved all aspects of the process, from writing to designing the layout of the book. He went on to study art and journalism at the University of Illinois, and it was while he was in college that his mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Then, just after his mother went through severe stomach surgery, his father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Six months later, both of his parents were dead. Eggers was just 21 years old.

Of the experience of losing both of his parents so suddenly, Eggers later said, "On the one hand you are so completely bewildered that something so surreal and incomprehensible could happen. At the same time, suddenly the limitations or hesitations that you might have imposed on yourself fall away. There's a weird, optimistic recklessness that could easily be construed as nihilism but is really the opposite. You see that there is a beginning and an end and that you have only a certain amount of time to act. And you want to get started."

Before he was able to finish his college degree, eggers had to become the guardian of his 8-year-old younger brother. They moved to Berkeley, California, and Eggers used the insurance money from his parents' deaths to start his own magazine with some high school friends. They called it Might Magazine. It only lasted for 16 issues. But Eggers went on to start a new literary journal called Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. He wanted to experiment with graphic design and printing techniques, so he changed the format of the journal for every issue. One issue consisted of 14 individually bound pamphlets. Another issue included a music CD with a different piece of music composed specifically to accompany each piece in the journal.

All the while that he was starting up these magazines, Dave Eggers was staying up late at night trying to write a book about the death of his parents and the effect that it had on his life. That book grew into his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a big best-seller in 2000.

Eggers has gone on to write a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry (2004), and two novels: You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) and What Is the What (2006). He also founded a writing center for young people in San Francisco called 826 Valencia, which has grown into a national organization designed to help and encourage young people to write.

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