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A few days after Christmas, 1866, a Québécois named Moses Graff married a 14-year-old girl named Mary Cabana. Mary's mother was an indigenous woman, most likely Haida, from British Columbia, given the name Catherine. The marriage took place in a tiny rough-and-tumble village called Seattle, whose population at that time would have been under 500. One Daniel Bagley, "Minister of the Gospel," performed the ceremony. I'll get back to the good Reverend Bagley, but the main point here is that Moses and Mary Graff were my 2nd great grandparents. One of Moses and Mary's four daughter, Sophia Graff, my great-grandmother, was born at Alki Point, Seattle, in 1870.

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In short, my Seattle roots run deep.

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I graduated from high school with a C+ grade average. Don't even ask how I managed to weedle my way to the University of Washington, only a half-hour bus ride from my home in north Seattle. One hundred years from Great-grandma Sophie's birth, I got my UW BA in English. 

 

I came to the UW several years after the death of Theodore Roethke, the poet who put Seattle on the literary map, in 1963. I'd never heard of him. Even so, I remember sensing that a pall in the corridors of the cavernous Padelford Hall, home of the English Department. At the time, during my agonizing first quarters at a dazed freshman, I was doing two things at once: writing my first poems and busy washing out of Oceanography, my declared major. Much of that agony was spent in a huge lecture auditorium in -- can you guess? -- Bagley Hall, the humorless brick home of the UW Chemistry Department. Organic chemistry closed the door on my dream of following in the footsteps of Jacques Cousteau.

 

After flunking out of the very university attended by both my parents, after taking a few community college classes to bring up my grades that would get me back to the UW, I changed my major to English. From that point on, all went wel. I fulfilled all the lit course requirements for my degree and continued taking poetry writing classes. The teachers gave me the right nudges were David Wagoner and the much-beloved Nelson Bentley. Bentley had been a close friend of Roethke's but found himself in Roethke's shadow. Where many of Roethke's student found him to be intimidating, Bentley was the warm, approachable, perhaps a little too kind-hearted, though it sounds funny when I say that. Later, I sat in on courses taught by visiting poets, incuding then-Sister Madeline Defrees (she left her order when I knew her), Seattle-born poet Richard Hugo, and a young, rising star East Coast poet named Mark Strand. Did I learn anything from these wonderful teachers and writers? The jury is still out.

 

Madeline Defrees saw something in my early poems that I myself did not recognize: the illusive "promise." She suggested I apply to the MFA program at the University of Montana. The idea of going to graduate school had never crossed my mind. No one was more surprised than me when I got my acceptance letter to enter the UM's MFA degree program in Creative Writing. Hugo and Defrees were co-chairs. 

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I became close to my teachers. Both were real poets who published books! Madeline had gotten me into to the program and even allowed me to live in her off campus apartment while I looked for a place to live in the weeks before the start of my first term. I had met her a year earlier in Seattle. I even invited her to my home to meet my folks. While in Missoula, Dick drove me in his big green Buick covertible an hour north from Missoula to the Flathead Reservation and his favorite trout lake, Kicking Horse Resevoir. 

 

It's funny, thinking about it now how, all those decades ago, all those years they've been gone, we grad students in creative writing socialized with our professors. Both Hugo and Defrees were unmarried, so they sought out friendships among their students. In Hugo's case, he might have been looking for more than friendship. My wife, Linda, and I met while on the UM campus. While I earned my MFA, she studied for her MA in English and American lit. But before we hit it off, Linda dated -- briefly -- Dick Hugo. When she announed to him that she'd taken a serious liking to one of his poetry students, he took this gentle rebuff graciously and with kind wishes for us. Later, within the span of several weeks in the summer of 1974,  I married Linda and Dick married Ripley Schemm.

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After a two-year stint working in the artist-in-the-schools programs in Montana, Idaho and Washington, Linda and I returned to my home city, Seattle. For the next 13 years, I taught part-time at several local community colleges. (We who were stuck in the exploited adjunct faculty rut called ourselves "freeway flyers" and would joke about holding our office hours while crossing parking lots to our cars for the drive to the next college.) At the advanced age of fifty, Shoreline hired me as a full tenured English professor. I taught composition, creative writing, and if I was nice I'd get to teach a Shakespeare course. After 32 years of riding my bike to my campus office, I retired in 2013. 

 

Linda and I have two sons, Devin and Ned. Both are educators in Portland, OR. ​We are devoted cyclists, gardeners, music lovers, travelers, theatre goers and fawning grandparents to Clio, Hilde, Cosmo and Moon. 

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