Joel Heffner is a man of many projects. One of his really fun ones is a site called “How We Became Writers: This is how we did it.”

He’s just posted my story of how I became a writer which includes my poem “Scribbler,” from “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary.”

You can read the entire post by clicking here to discover what wandering on the land, reading old-fashioned books…and having a blue collar father who writes…can do for you…if you’re an impressionable young thing in Southwestern Illinois in the 1950s and growing up on land that’s been in the family since the 1860s.