Robert Allan Richardson

Sometime during my senior year in high school when the question "What do you want to be?" kept being thrust upon me and seemed to demand an answer, I told myself "I'll be a writer." It was such a relief. I had noticed that writers came from all sorts of backgrounds, underwent no mandatory training, and faced no examining boards or licensing agencies that might keep them from plying their craft. Anything I did would prepare me for such an endeavor and I could begin to get ready for it by imagining my eventual glory and continuing to do as I pleased.

I did not announce this decision to anyone else. I knew it would find no favor with my auditors and might be met with scorn. Besides, publicly declaring it could seem to oblige me to defend my choice by writing something. This would be fatal to the sense of liberation that arose simply from telling myself I meant to do it. Better to keep quiet about this newfound calling and enjoy my freedom from every looming care of grownup occupation or career. I would make myself known as a writer someday and that would be soon enough.

A long Someday it was, lasting more than forty years. It wasn't that I never wrote. I churned out plenty of papers at Park College while I was a student there in the late 1950's, and produced a three hundred page doctoral dissertation at Yale on Kant's theory of the beautiful. Occasional lectures and other academic stuff followed, but I knew these things didn't begin to fulfill the bedeviling promise--half specious and half serious--I had made in that youthful bargain with myself. Later, in my thirties, when I seemed to have terminated my academic career by speaking once or twice too often out of turn, I worked at things that I chose to do because they would allow me time to write: field man for the Dairy Herd Improvement Association, manager of a summer-stock theatre, auctioneer. Some writing did emerge. A dozen or so of my pieces appeared in print, the best of them in The North American Review, and others in places as various as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and The Mother Earth News. But, viewed in the light of my original declaration these did not amount to much, and when the fell clutch of economic circumstance required me to find work that paid better, but made many more demands on my time, I put aside my notion of being a writer--with some relief, I admit, because it was such hard work, but not without regret.

As the clock ticked down toward the end of the millennium with its attendant public alarms, a calamity of my own made me realize just how fast it happened to be ticking for me. Unless I woke up, 'Nevermore' would be my writing's epitaph. I busied myself with a few of the stories I always supposed I would write and put them in shape for someone else to see. I mailed them, along with my application for admission, to a month-long writing workshop to be held at The International Writers School in Galway, Ireland.

The stories were far from the gems I intended but were good enough to get me in. The healthy scrutiny they got from the other workshop participants helped me see how I could make them better; and having them read and talked about there made my ambition public at last. The company of these other aspirants was itself a benefit, and it added to the pleasure of it to be joined every day by accomplished writers who visited the workshop and told us many things about their writing lives, including this: "You can't imagine," said the poet Paula Meehan, "what a shock it was to me to discover that in order to become a writer I would actually have to write something." I understood exactly what she meant.

Back home I put what I had gleaned from the Galway experience into practice by writing a story called "A Piece of the Country." On the strength of it and a couple of other things, I was invited to attend a special session the following summer at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, taught by Frank Conroy, the Workshop's longtime director. It was intense, exacting, chastening, heartening, and every bit of it mattered. What was best about it though was that it taught me to believe I could become the writer I had always told myself I was going to be.