Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1989
Abstract
Writing for Mademoiselle in the spring of 1971, David Wagoner described his introduction to the Northwest as an ordeal lasting some five minutes. He had grown up in Whiting, Indiana, where his father had worked as a smelter at the steel mills in the industrial wasteland between Gary, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois. Those images from his childhood are recorded in his first collection of poems, Dry Sun, Dry Wind (1953), and in five novels which are centered in the urban Midwest. But in 1971 the forty-five-year-old poet and novelist could speak not as a Midwesterner, but as a Westerner: “I parked my car on an off-shoot of a gravel road along the Olympic Peninsula’s Hoh River near one of the last two virgin rain forests in North America . . . , took one look at the maze of sword ferns, huckleberry, wildflowers, seedling firs, moss and incredibly welcoming greenness of a world I’d never imagined, and started walking straight in, as though I expected to be met by God. But the god turned out to be Pan, and when I’d finished my panicky circles in his honor a few hours later, I clung to my rediscovered steering wheel with what felt like a new wisdom. I was no longer a Middle Westerner” (246).
Recommended Citation
McFarland, Ron. David Wagoner. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1989. Digital. Western Writers Series, 88.