Michael N. McGregor

Thoreau, Gandhi, Malcolm X: Books About Spiritual Quests

The following post appeared today on the Combined Academic blog in England, in celebration of Robert Lax’s 100th birthday:

THE HIDDEN AND THE TANGIBLE by Michael N. McGregor

I don’t know when I first put spiritual and quest together. In my childhood church the word spiritual was seldom used, so I never thought about it. It took on meaning when I heard it spoken in the plural, applied to moving songs by enslaved people. It still bears that soul-deep sound for me, the suffering and longing for freedom.

Quest, I’m sure, came first through knights and Argonauts, the tales and myths of boyhood. While spiritual sounds softer, more ethereal, quest suggests a hardy physical journey, a dauntless searching through the material world. It’s the joining of these elements—the soft and hard, the hidden and the tangible—that gives the term spiritual quest a holistic feel, a sense that it involves one’s whole being.

I was well into writing my biography of poet Robert Lax before I realized that it was the story of a spiritual quest. This realization got me thinking about the books that influenced me when I was young, most of which, I found, had spiritual quests at their core.

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The first that came to mind was Walden, which I first read in high school. It made me want to homestead in the Canadian woods just north of my Seattle home. I don’t remember Thoreau calling his solitary living a spiritual quest, but his book is full of things described in holy ways: the woods, the lake, the west. The benefits of simple living. His quest was for a way to live that kept him in the moment and in nature. His physical movement was small—a short walk from his Concord home—but he roamed continents in his thoughts, explored exotic lands within his soul.

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The second book I thought of—Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—is more focused on movement, in this case a motorcycle ride, but that movement is even less necessary in terms of getting places than Thoreau’s walk from Concord. What’s more important for Pirsig is being away from one’s regular routine, out where paying close attention is both possible and needed. There, a mindful focus on the seemingly mundane unlocks his narrator’s thoughts about the Greek ideal of Quality, a value he finds lacking in the modern world.

I’m a bit embarrassed to reveal the third book that came to me, The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, because I’m not sure I read it. It’s possible I only saw the Bill Murray movie. In the film, Murray plays a man who returns from World War I traumatized by his experiences. He rejects the regular life offered him and sets off on a quest for meaning. His quest takes him through the things that matter to other people, all the ways they seek fulfillment, including books. In the scene I remember most, he sits outside, alone and cold, somewhere in Asia, feeding pages from a suddenly useless book into a warming fire. He has realized that what gives life meaning is ineffable.

Two other books that came to mind don’t describe journeys per se. Not chosen ones, at least. One is Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he explores the psychological states of Holocaust victims. A Holocaust survivor himself, Frankl finds that the survivors’ most important trait was the understanding that in any circumstance, no matter how dire, we retain the freedom to choose our attitude toward it.

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The other book is James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays drawn from Baldwin’s life that echo Frankl’s thinking. Instead of focusing only on the individual, though, Baldwin looks at our society. Not only do we have the ability to choose our attitudes, he says, but the choices we make determine our common future. The quest implied in both these books is to become a person who can make what are, in essence, spiritual choices.

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The last three books I thought of are all a type of spiritual autobiography and so, I guess, more truly fit the category: Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (in which I first encountered Robert Lax).

I found Gandhi’s book tedious in places but his story of becoming sensitized to the world’s needs through experiences of prejudice and encounters with the less fortunate inspired me to pursue more of these encounters myself. Once again, my memory of a book has been altered by a movie. Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi” shows him riding through India in a third-class train car to learn about the life of the common people. In the scene I remember most, he sits in his homespun clothes, still and aware, absorbing the noise and chaos of the lives around him rather than fleeing. It is this acceptance of the moment, his poorer countrymen’s reality, that allows Gandhi to transcend his privilege and become a true leader.

Malcolm X’s book is even more clearly about the struggle with one’s self as well as with society. In many ways it is the most extraordinary book on this list because Malcolm X had only his own awareness and fire to change him from an angry hustler for whom racial oppression is a given into a touchstone for whites as well as blacks, an evolving consciousness enlarged by his mistakes as well as his triumphs.

Merton’s book is the one that most emphasizes the spiritual. It’s tempting to say that he had fewer physical things to struggle against—he wasn’t a victim of racism or a Holocaust survivor; he didn’t have the mental problems of Pirsig’s narrator or the horrifying memories of Maugham’s hero—yet Merton was aware that his main struggle was against his worldly self: his complacency, his egoism, his misplaced desires. Nothing outside his own consciousness forced him to confront himself and the life he was living. Yet he was willing to relinquish everything to find the meaning he desired, to reject all physical comfort in pursuit of a purely spiritual good.

So what has been the benefit of reading these books? Awareness, I suppose. Increased sensitivity. And camaraderie across the ages: a feeling that I’m not alone in my own spiritual pursuits. These fellow seekers give me courage and models to remember when my own struggles, however comparatively small, sometimes seem too much.

Michael N. McGregor is the author of the new biography Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax (Fordham University Press, 2015) . A former journalist and editor, he is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Portland State University.

The photograph used at the beginning of this post was taken by Michael McGregor.

Thoughts on the Refugees Crossing to Greece

When the Greek islands were hospitable to strangers

Nov 04, 2015 by Michael N. McGregor

Recently the online world has been filled with images of people in desperate conditions, images not from Pakistan or Syria but from the Greek islands closest to Turkey: Chios, Lesbos, Leros. One picture showed a migrant raft landing near sunbathing tourists on Kos, an island I once knew well. It was a way station on my yearly visits to the nearby island of Patmos, where St. John was once a refugee himself. I went there to visit another immigrant to Greece: a spiritual poet named Robert Lax, who was Thomas Merton’s best friend.

Lax made his home in Greece, first on the island of Lesbos, then on Kalymnos, and finally on Patmos. One reason he did this was that the Greek Orthodox islanders lived their Christian faith more deeply and fully than other people he’d known, and this included following the biblical injunction to show hospitality to strangers. When Lax landed on Lesbos in 1962 and then traveled through the islands, people came out of their homes to give him things—loaves of fresh bread, water from a well, an apronful of almonds.

They did this because he was a stranger passing through a land that had few strangers in it. And because they believed the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:40: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Even when I started visiting in the 1980s, the Greek islanders were still overwhelmingly hospitable, calling out to me to offer oranges or water or ouzo.

It wasn’t until 2006 that I witnessed a different response to people entering the country. As I walked to a beach on Patmos one day, a voice called out to me. Off to my left in a decrepit building—a onetime school or government structure—the second-floor windows were lined with thin, dark-skinned men apparently being detained. The one calling out asked me to come nearer. When I did, he pantomimed that he wanted a pen. When I pulled one out of my pocket, he lowered a kind of bucket on a rope made of rags. Then, as the men in the windows were smiling and nodding their thanks, two Greek women arrived with bags of supplies for them—cigarettes and food and sodas. These women may have been the last remnant of those who once greeted strangers openly.

I don’t know if the men in that building were Albanians, who were the main Greek refugees then, or if they were part of the first wave of what has become a flood of Middle Easterners seeking a haven in Europe. The number of refugees pouring into Greece this year, most of them fleeing the fighting in Syria, is more than ten times last year’s number. An estimated 50,000 people entered Greece in July alone. And the conditions they are kept in—in this once-hospitable country—are worse than those I saw as a journalist in refugee camps on the Cambodian border and off the coast of Malaysia during the era of the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese boat people.

No doubt some of the Christian people in Greece are calling the refugees crossing the watery border “criminals,” “terrorists,” and even “rapists,” as migrants have been called by some in the U.S. Given the economic situation, it makes sense that Greeks would be afraid. The once healthy flow of EU money has thinned, and unemployment—even without migrants—is at 25 percent (50 percent among youth). Where, though, I wonder, lies the line between biblical hospitality and self-preservation?

“Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord,” says Proverbs 19:17, “and he will reward them for what they have done.” The question for God, I suppose, is Is there a limit? Can you really expect us to welcome anyone? What about our own safety?

When he was young, the poet Lax, like his friend Merton, chose to live simply, without possessions he’d need to protect. But he did it out in the world, on his own, not in a monastery. His small house on Patmos had a lock, but he left the key in the outside slot. I wonder now, 15 years after his death, as people are celebrating his centenary and Merton’s, how he would view these refugees. I wonder, too, how I should view them, having known and written a book about him. Having been a Christian all my life.

Full Text of the Oregonian’s Thoughtful Review of PURE ACT

Oregonian: Robert Lax’s pure life examined by Portland State professor Michael N. McGregor

Author: Jim Carmin

Posted: November 5, 2015

This article originally appeared in The Oregonian:

It’s comforting to know that even with the vast amount of information for which we now have access there are still biographies to be written about fascinating individuals most of us have never heard of. Michael N. McGregor, a professor of English and creative writing at Portland State University, has given us one of these: “Pure Act,” a highly readable and erudite account of the life and work of poet Robert Lax (1915-2000), a man whose poems and moral standing in the world deserve greater recognition than they’ve had.

Known perhaps less for his poetry and more for his friendships, Lax became close with writer Jack Kerouac, painter Ad Reinhardt, editor/author William Maxwell, and especially Thomas Merton, the great poet, monk, social activist, and one of four Americans that Pope Francis recently called exemplary before his address to Congress. Like Merton, Lax was a quiet and extremely spiritual man; he was introduced by Kerouac to his mother as a saint. When Lax wrote, he did it mostly for himself with little thought of commercial or financial gain. Both he and Merton, besides being hugely influenced early on by the writing style of Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake,” took a vow when they were young to write simply. Lax took this notion “to a daring extreme,” especially as he developed his short-lined, sometimes single-word, vertical poems.

McGregor, who met Lax in 1985 and got to know him well through the years while visiting him often at his modest home on the Greek isle of Patmos, meticulously researched the archives at Columbia and St. Bonaventure universities to present us with a warm, sympathetic literary biography of this complicated man who lived life as simply as possible.

Born in Olean, N.Y., Lax moved to and from Olean to New York City for much of his early life. In Olean he often stayed at his brother-in-law’s cottage, sometimes with friends such as Merton drinking wine and coffee, and writing and talking late into the night. In New York City, after graduating from Columbia where he (and Merton) studied with poet Mark Van Doren, Lax worked briefly for The New Yorker and later as co-editor (with Merton) for Jubilee, a Catholic literary magazine. (Despite growing up Jewish, Lax converted to Catholicism early in his life.)

But it was Europe that had the most lasting impact on him, especially early on with a visit to Marseille where Lax taught himself a “willingness to accept and even embrace poverty … the poverty that comes from simplifying one’s desires and thereby reducing one’s need to earn money.” This daily monk-like sensibility led Lax to develop a way of life he called pure act: “a natural living out of one’s God-given abilities and potentials without the splitting-off of consciousness that might question or judge.”

McGregor argues effectively of the influences that helped shaped Lax’s work and life, noting that “Kerouac helped him think differently about how he wrote, and Reinhardt helped him find his way beyond artistic conventions.” McGregor’s fluid narrative moves easily through the life of the man and the poet for whom he clearly has great respect and admiration: from Lax’s uncertainties in his early life to his difficulties in having to leave the island of Kalymnos after the complications of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and his last years on Patmos where he lived as he always wanted, simply, with no refrigerator, no phone, and mostly on the generosity of his friends and neighbors.

After reading McGregor’s deeply satisfying “Pure Act” we conclude that Lax lived an admirable life, remaining true to his beliefs to the end, including his strongest thought that life should be lived simply and slowly; the words marking his gravestone perfectly capturing his preferred place in the world: “slow boat / calm river / quiet landing.”

Reading: McGregor and John Beer will lead “A Celebration of Robert Lax” at 7 p.m. Dec. 9 at Literary Arts, 925 S.W. Washington St., Portland, OR.

Jim Carmin, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Portland.

The Oregonian Reviews Pure Act

Portland’s Oregonian newspaper just posted a review of Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax on its website, Oregonlive.com: “Robert Lax’s pure life examined by Portland State professor Michael N. McGregor.”

At the end of the review there’s a plug for one of my upcoming events: A Celebration of Robert Lax at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, December 9, at Oregon Literary Arts (925 SW Washington St, Portland, OR), with readings by poet John Beer and me and a podcast interview of the two of us by Late Night Library‘s Paul Martone.

I’ll also be reading from my book in a “pop-up” event at 2:30 p.m. this Saturday (Nov. 7) in the Modern Section of the Portland Art Museum and appearing onstage at 5 p.m. that same day in PAM’s Miller Gallery in an event called “On Biography: Joan Didion and Robert Lax” with biographer Tracy Daugherty. Both events are part of Portland’s annual Wordstock book festival.

Two Chicago Appearances This Week: Oct. 28 and Nov. 1

I’ll be speaking and reading from Pure Act at two very different events in Chicago this week:

The first event is at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, October 28 at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. in Hyde Park. I’ll be in conversation with Poetry magazine editor Don Share and critic Max Nelson from The Point literary journal. Poetry, the oldest poetry monthly in the U.S., will be featuring Robert Lax’s work in its December issue, a 20-page spread with an introduction by me. This reading is co-sponsored by The Point and the Lumen Christi Institute.

The second event is at 1 p.m. on Sunday, November 1 at City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie Blvd., just off Logan Square. This one will be a bit more intimate, with just me talking and reading.

(Between these two Chicago appearances, I’ll be part of a panel at the “Transcending Orthodoxies” conference at Notre Dame University, speaking on “The Language of Spiritual Literature in a Post-Religious Era.”)

I hope to see you at one or both events!

Peace Is a Good Thing to Seek: An Interview for Bearings Online

The following interview appeared on Bearings Online, run by the Collegeville Institute at St. John’s University in MN, where I work as a writing coach each summer. The interviewer, poet Betsy Johnson-Miller, has published two books of poetry: Rain When You Want Rain, and Fierce This Falling.

Peace Is a Good Thing to Seek: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax

An Interview with Michael N. McGregor

October 15, 2015 by Betsy Johnson-Miller

Michael N. McGregor, author and professor of creative writing in the Department of English at Portland State University, published a biography in September 2015 titled Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. The book chronicles Lax’s life and his career as a poet. It also explores some of the important relationships Lax had—with God, with Thomas Merton, with a family of circus performers, and with McGregor himself.

McGregor has been associated with the Collegeville Institute since 2009. He spent a semester in residence in the fall of 2011, and has taught several writing workshops over the years. Betsy Johnson-Miller spoke with Michael about his book when he was in Collegeville for a three-day author residency.

You wrote this book, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax, at least in part, as a result of meeting Robert Lax. Would you have written this biography if you hadn’t met Lax in person?

It was the presence of the man and getting to know him that intrigued me. I wanted to uncover more of the details of his life. I never expected to write a biography, and I’m not sure I would have written this if I’d just encountered his writing or even things about him.

Could you give us a sense of his presence?

To be in his presence was to feel loved, delighted, and completely accepted.

In the book, I talk about how he described Thomas Merton with only one word: liveliness. And that’s what I would say about Lax as well. When I met him, he was 69, and that’s an age when many people do not have a lot of liveliness left. But he was delightfully lively. He was, in many ways, childlike, and to be in his presence was to feel loved, delighted, and completely accepted.

Is it what he said? Or how he looked at the world?

Lax was lively in his manner and how he treated people. He would often say, “Yes, yes,” or “Good, good.” Those were his favorite phrases, and he was always encouraging people to say what they had to say, to express themselves, or in my case, to write things down. He would often break our conversations and say, “Write that down, write that down.” Sometimes, when he felt someone especially needed encouragement, he would say, “Well, that reminds me of Merton.” He may have meant it, but he also may have been thinking, “This person needs encouragement, so let me compare you to this friend of mine who is amazing.”

Lax had a deep and abiding friendship with Thomas Merton that impacted both of their lives. Merton became a monk, whereas Lax did not. Would you say they both led holy lives?

When we talk about a holy person, we are in danger of over-spiritualizing. We start to think of someone as not meant for this world. That is not the case with Lax. He was fully alive as a human being. He was of this world, but at the same time, he was fully attending to the living God, and he was fully alive as a human being to the people around him, and to himself. Merton and Lax were very different people personality-wise. They had different gifts, different ways they were tuned. But they both had a thirst for God that was their primary characteristic.

How would Lax describe the act of writing?

Lax would not have separated writing from living. He was always trying to get at what his soul was saying to itself. He believed that “down there” was where God speaks to us, from inside of us, at our deepest core. So, writing was a sacred act, but so was living. For Lax, every breath was a holy thing.

Should we consider Lax an exemplar? In other words, should we as people or as writers try to live like he lived?

Lax would never have said, “Live like me.” In fact, if you started to suggest you were going to emulate him, it would have made him very nervous. Except he did want people to emulate him in this way—to love, to be as close to pure love as you could be. It wasn’t important for him what your circumstances were or what you pursued, as long as you pursued it out of love.

There’s a story in the book about a young man going fishing. Lax believed if that man wants to go fishing instead of caring for his grandmother, if he’s not caring for her out of love, then it’s better for him to go fishing. Because he should do what he does out of love. That was how Lax saw life.

One of his most important characteristics—embracing poverty—unleashed a great deal of energy and time in his life. He might talk to you about it, but he wouldn’t say, “You have to do this—live this same way.” Some people called him a guru. I don’t. Gurus tend to give you ways to live and are much more prescriptive about that, and he was never prescriptive. For Lax, what was important was to put ourselves in a place where grace can flow, because once we do that, then things start happening. He also believed very strongly that everybody desires God, and the more we can recognize and act on that desire, the more things will take care of themselves.

As a writer yourself, how did Lax’s thoughts on writing influence you?

What Lax said was that you should write what you want to write and then try to say it as well as you can.

The most important thing that he unlocked for me as a writer was the idea that I should write about the things that are mine to write about and that I care about. As a young writer, it’s easy to get all these ideas, or think “I want to be in this magazine, so I should write this.” What Lax said was that you should write what you want to write and then try to say it as well as you can. More importantly, he believed you should write for yourself first and only, really. He said that if an editor gets to see that writing, he should consider himself lucky.

It’s a very different way than we are taught to think about writing. We’re taught to think that we’ve got to do these things to get people to print our work. Lax believed strongly that as a writer, if that’s the thing you are called to do, then your job is to write what you are interested in as well as you can and try to get closer and closer to a kind of truth in that. If that happens, then the publication part will take care of itself.

Many writers are known for their edgy lives, whether in terms of sexual behavior or alcoholism or drugs. Lax falls at the opposite end of the spectrum. What do you make of that dynamic, both in terms of Lax himself, and of writers and writing in general?

Some people look at the lifestyles of legends like Fitzgerald and Hemingway and think, “Oh, that’s how you become a good writer,” rather than thinking “these good writers did stupid things that eventually impaired their writing instead of enhancing it.”

The best example of this from Lax’s life is the difference between him and Jack Kerouac. They were friends right around the time On the Road came out. This was a high point of Kerouac’s life as a writer in many ways, and there was this moment when Kerouac was going to follow Lax to live in a spiritual community outside of Paris. Lax went first, but Kerouac never joined him. He wrote Lax a letter that basically said, “Bob, I’m not coming. That’s the kind of thing I need to get away from,” and he turned to Buddhism instead. Even more than that—and Kerouac’s honest about it in the letter—he turned to women and drink, and the life destroyed him. And the same thing happened to others—like Dylan Thomas—who were in Lax’s life as well.

Lax said that the best gift you can give to other people is to take care of yourself.

Over time, Lax developed this sense that we need to take care of ourselves, and that doing so allows us to do our best for other people, for our writing, for whatever. Late in life he said that the best gift you can give to other people is to take care of yourself, even physically. Some writers think that they have to be where the buzz is, that they have to be in there, moving and doing things. Lax felt that the buzz he was interested in was inside himself.

Is there a moment with Lax that has stayed with you?

One such moment is when he signed one of his books and gave it to me. Inside it read, “There’s not much difference between us.” Another was toward the end of his life when he told me, “I had a dream last night that you said to me, ‘Peace is a good thing to seek, and love does conquer all.’” The second one in particular felt like a charge to me in a way. I don’t think he meant it that way. I think it was more of a hopeful thought, a hopeful dream for him, but I certainly go back to it and think, “Yes, I want to be that person and always doing that.”

The Company We Keep

One of the things virtually every American author does, it seems, is check the sales ranking on his Amazon page. The part of the page I find most interesting, though, is the section just above the editorial reviews where other books bought by those who’ve bought my book are listed. If, as people say, we’re known by the company we keep, this is where the true value of a book is revealed. I have to say I’ve felt humbled and quite pleased by the books that appear there.

Among the authors represented are: Pope Francis, James Joyce, Meister Eckhart, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Vincent Van Gogh, Thich Nhat Hanh, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Louis Bouyer, Daniel Berrigan, Jane Hirshfield, Richard Rohr, James Martin, Matthew Fox, Ilia Delio, Rowan Williams, Jim Forest, John Dear, Christopher Pramuk, Michael W. Higgins and Elizabeth Gilbert.

Impressive as that list is, it’s the book titles I enjoy most. Taken together, they become a poem:

The Springs of Contemplation/Making All Things New/In the School of the Prophets/At Play in Creation/We Are Already One

What the Mystics Know/Waking, Dreaming, Being/The Divine Within/The Ground of Love and Truth/All Is Grace

Between the Dark and the Daylight/A Sunlit Absence/Striving Towards Being/Praying the Psalms/Eager to Love

The Taste of Silence/The Submerged Reality/This Present Moment/Crowded by Beauty/Fully Alive

Creating Beauty with Words: An Interview for the University of Portland

Here’s an interview with some of my thoughts on writing, reading and Pure Act, conducted by Jackie Ott, a young writer at the University of Portland. It was originally posted on the UP English department’s blog. At the end you’ll find some advice for aspiring writers.

An Interview with Michael McGregor

by Jackie Ott

On October 6, the University Book Store will be flooded with the wisdom of Robert Lax and the beauty of Michael McGregor’s words. McGregor’s reading is sponsored by our very own English department and the Garaventa Center, and he will read from his new book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax, a biography about the inspirational, spiritual poet who influenced many, including McGregor himself. I had a chance to interview McGregor about his passion for the work of Lax and his own career as a writer. Here’s what he had to say:

For someone who may not have heard of Robert Lax, what would you say is the draw of Lax as a poet? What made you want to write a book on his life?

Lax was an incredibly inventive poet whose work makes you more aware of life’s moments and their transcendent possibilities. My fascination with him goes far beyond his poetry, however. When Lax was young, he had a deep influence on the spiritual development of his close friend Thomas Merton. When he was older—after working for the New Yorker, reviewing films for Time, writing scripts in Hollywood and even traveling with a circus—he settled among poor fishermen and sponge divers in Greece because he wanted to learn their wisdom.

I wrote about him because I knew him for 15 years and he was the most remarkable and loving man I ever met.

What is your writing process?

When writing nonfiction, I like to gather as much information as I can and then live with it for a while before starting to write, to know it as intimately as possible, to digest it fully, so the writing feels as if it’s coming from a place of true understanding. I like to write in the morning, before the day’s events crowd my thoughts. I’m a slow, multi-draft writer. I read things over many times, often out loud to hear the rhythms of the words and sentences.

What kind of research did you do in the writing of your new book?

I did extensive research over many years for this book. I spent hours upon hours in Lax’s archives at Columbia University and St. Bonaventure University, reading through journals and letters, watching films, going through pictures, and even checking postmarks on cancelled stamps to see where he was on what date. In addition, I interviewed his family and friends, visited the many places he lived (Marseilles, the French Alps, the Greek islands of Kalymnos and Patmos, etc.), and read countless books on the times in which he lived, the subjects that influenced him (poetry, jazz, meditative writers), and his friends (Merton, Jack Kerouac, William Maxwell, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Van Doren and more).

What works of literature have been formative for you as a writer? What are you reading right now?

Instead of individual works, let me give you authors. There are too many to count, but here are a few: Tolstoy taught me how to evoke a feeling of lived life, Hemingway taught me how to be clear and give flow to my sentences, Kundera taught me how to write ideas into stories, Homer taught me how to write with action, Conrad taught me how to think about narration and multiple viewpoints rendered from a single perspective, A. J. A. Symons taught me how to turn a biography into a quest for identity, Baldwin taught me to prioritize humanity in everything I write, Borges taught me how to use repetition and invention, Hugo taught me how to reach for deeper emotions, the great Hebrew and early Christian writers taught me how to address spiritual matters in a variety of ways, Camus taught me how to focus on the beauty of existence, and Lax himself taught me how to write with economy and clarity. Of them all, Baldwin, especially in his nonfiction, has been my best teacher.

Right now I’m reading a book about the relationship between Baldwin’s prose and the various musical styles that have come out of the African American experience: blues, jazz, gospel, spirituals, etc.

Although Pure Act is your first book, you have an impressive number of works published in various styles from poetry to journalism. Out of all the types of writing you do, do you have a favorite and if so why?

I can’t say I favor one over another, but I love storytelling, working with ideas, and creating beauty with words. So fiction, I suppose…or maybe literary nonfiction…or possibly poetry….

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Write as much as you can, every day, and don’t quit. Study those who’ve done it well. Slow down enough to really see life and hear language. Be thankful for each moment and always, in every moment, be fully human–alive, compassionate and filled with joy.

Two Pacific Northwest Talks Coming Up: Seattle and Portland

I’ll be giving talks on Pure Act at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle at 3 p.m. on Sunday, October 4, and at the University of Portland bookstore at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, October 6. (See my Talks page for location details.)

These talks are significant to me for different reasons:

Seattle: Having grown up in Seattle, I’ve long dreamed of giving a book talk at Elliott Bay, the top bookstore in the city. And the talk is being co-sponsored by Image literary journal, which published my essay A Gyroscope On the Island of Love and named me its Artist of the Month in March of 2012. The other co-sponsor is Wave Books, which put out a great collection of Lax’s later poetry in 2013: poems (1962-1997), edited by my Portland State University colleague John Beer.

Portland: The University of Portland reading was arranged by my dear friend and former thesis student Fr. Pat Hannon, who teaches there. Pat’s thesis was published last year by Ave Maria Press as a book called Sacrament: Personal Encounters with Memories, Wounds, Dreams, and Unruly Hearts. Pat will be introducing me. This will also be my first reading in Portland since my book came out.

I hope you’ll come to one of these talks if you’re in the area, and spread the word to your friends!

In Memoriam: C. K. Williams (1936-2015), Robert Lax’s Good Friend

I’m writing this on Monday, September 21, the official publication date for Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. I was going to write a celebratory post and remind everyone that we’ll be honoring Lax the Poet at 7 p.m. at McNally Jackson Books in SoHo this evening. But C. K. Williams, the wonderful poet and friend of Lax, was supposed to be part of tonight’s event and he died yesterday. The show will go on, as they say, but it will be a bit less joyous.

I didn’t know C. K. Williams–or Charlie, as he was known to Lax and his other friends–but I’m proud to say he blurbed my book. To honor him, I thought I’d tell the story of how that blurb came about.

I knew from my research that Lax had met Williams and his wife Catherine Mauger on the island of Patmos in the summer of 1973 and visited them in Paris in later years. When I shifted from research to writing on my book in 2007, I wrote to Williams and asked if he’d be willing to blurb it. He wrote back: “I don’t usually write blurbs anymore, but I will for a book about Lax.” I know those were his exact words because I wrote them down on a Post-It note I kept in my desk drawer for seven years.

When I finally had a publisher for the book, I wrote to Williams again, afraid he might have changed his mind. This time his return message said: “Good to hear you’ve finished the book. I’d like very much to write a comment for it.”

Although he received my book late and had to deliver his blurb sooner than he had been told, Williams was generous and accommodating. More than anything else, I was looking forward to meeting him tonight and thanking him in person. I will have to meet him in his poetry now and thank him by telling others about it.

Let me close by showing you what he wrote for my book, which you’ll find on the front inside flap of the dust jacket. Although it’s ostensibly a blurb, it’s really a loving commentary on the life and spirit of his dear friend and a testament to their friendship:

“Robert Lax was a poet who devised his own poetic forms, much admired by some readers, unfortunately unknown to most. He was an intellectual and was often called a mystic, but he was neither, just as he was called a hermit but really wasn’t. When he was younger, he lived in New York, where he worked for a period at The New Yorker and knew many figures in the arts, from Jack Kerouac, to Ad Reinhardt, E. B. White, William Maxwell . . . the list goes on. Most crucially he was a close friend of Thomas Merton’s and was made known, a little, by Merton’s autobiography, in which he appears. He also for a time traveled with a circus and wrote a lovely little book about it, The Circus of the Sun”–hard to find, but worth the search. For the larger parts of his life he lived alone, on islands in Greece, and spent much, perhaps most, of his time in solitude and meditation, trying to find some kind of ultimate peace (though he never put it that way). Even then he knew and was admired by many; and many others who’d only heard of him sought him out. He was invariably hospitable and welcoming, his presence gentle, humorous, and utterly patient. In short, there’s never been anyone like him, and Pure Act, in its offering of a detailed recounting of his life and an acute presentation and analysis of his too-neglected poetry, gives him to us: the gift of a human being unlike any other.”

–C. K. Williams