User Profile

This blog is patterned after Dostoevsky's "A Writer's Diary" -- the 19th century's most compelling attempt to occupy the contested ground between literature, journalism, and the private diary. Dostoevsky tried to put the living word in common, to bring it home for us all. Growing up as a military brat, I never thought where I was mattered as much as the people and connections I managed to maintain across distance and time. But those connections were always being broken, and the world was forever dropping away. So when I discovered Dostoevsky’s stories of ruining and then reweaving the world of human relationships in my freshman year of college, I felt I’d finally found how to begin the work of understanding and entering the world before me. By 18, I'd lived in 3 countries, and had liked them all. But I hadn't worked out how to connect where I was to who I was. My real education dates from my discovery of Dostoevsky and, later that same semester, from the first page of a daily journal, dated 1 December 1973. I've written in it since that time. It has provided the framework for the other pivotal educational events of my life: I learned to play guitar at 14, learned to read and to love at 16, learned to teach at 26, and learned to learn in my early 30s. The journal has also reflected and sometimes guided the key personal events that have made and then re-made my existence as my own. I've been deeply in love four times, although not always sequentially. I have three sons; in their different ways, they each teach me the world I want to commit to. At least once for each of the past 10 years I have tried to plant, build, or write something that would outlive me.