The TeachingBooks Blog
When I was a kid I was an explorer and a researcher. At the public library I discovered books that opened doors to hidden worlds and strange mysteries. One book led to another, and another, and on it went.
I do not consider myself a poet. I do read plenty of poetry but am trained in prose. After all, I started my writing life as a journalist, on the police beat. Very little time was devoted to crafting just the right phrase; mostly I was panicking to make deadline.
I remember it clearly—the day the inspiration for Papa’s Mechanical Fish (Farrar, 2013) fell in my lap. I was sitting cross-legged on the basement floor of the Old Lighthouse Museum in Michigan City, Indiana, rummaging through a box of photographs when a crumbling, decades-old booklet slipped out from a manila folder.
