Bonnie G Roberts's Reading Interests

When I was only 15 years old, my father read French novels to me--in English, that is. He loved Camus, Voltaire, and Montaigne, especially. He taught me to think, using the Socratic method. For example, in L'Etranger, he might ask, "Why do you think Camus has only a single light bulb on a cord in the room of the coffin?" I might not have any idea, but that was not my father's point. He wanted me to think about what I was reading. I also came to love French writers; two of my favorites--Baudelaire and Flaubert. In college, I set out as an English major, but ended up as a French major because I enjoyed French literature, actually, more than English literature. I did get my Masters, many years later, in English Literature, but I think I was more influenced by the Irish writers--Yeats, Joyce, O'Casey, Tim O'Brien (one of my favorite books: At Swim-Two-Birds). The most important writer to me, of my whole life, however, has been an American poet--Walt Whitman. I fell in love with Whitman, but, actually that was long after I had become a poet. I don't share his feelings about the greatness of America or the glory of life in the city. I feel a great kinship with him in his sense of connectedness with everything, his belief in everything being connected, and also the sometimes bold, earthy sensuality of his language. I think Whitman finds beauty even in ugliness, and this ability is also what most attracts me to the works of Baudelaire. Being a poet/writer was also possibly in my genetic heritage. My great-great grandmother was named Jane Story. She was pure-blooded Cherokee. Her name was given to her by white men because she was a story teller. My father was a tall tale teller! And a good one. My father's mother loved poetry, even though she only went through the third grade. At ninety, she could still recite the whole of "The Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus." On my mother's side, my grandmother wrote rhyming poetry about her family life with her five children, and my mother wrote limericks. In my family, language was an important matter. We had to look up words we didn't know; our parents didn't talk down to us as children. We often spoke of the etymology of words and also their nuances. Every Saturday, my mother took my sister and me to the Florence public library, which was a quiet and sacred place. We checked out six more books to replace the six we had turned in. She always showed me that my name was in one of those books, high on a shelf--a shelf that looked like a monolith to me. She brought down a collection of poems by Robert Burns, another poet I have always loved. My mother had named me after one of his poems, "Bonnie Leslye." She would say, "See, Bonnie, there is your name, written in a book." And she would read me the entire poem.

When I was growing up, I had absolutely no idea of being a writer and certainly not a poet, though I did write newspaper stories for my family on the backs of old sample ballots, which used to be quite large. And I once wrote a three or four-page novella about a little red-haired boy who found out he was adopted and ran away from home. I also loved to tack little notes to what I called "mailboxes" on my parents' and my sister's door to leave messages of great import: "When is dinner? I am hungry."

I was encouraged in high school and college to write, and my father so wanted me to write because he thought I had some talent at it. I rebelled. The last thing I was going to do was something that would make him happy. One day, a friend asked me, "Do you think you could write, even though it makes your father happy?" I said, "I suppose so." I was thirty years old, with a three-year-old baby. While she was napping one day, I just sat down in the rocker and wrote my first poem. I had read all kinds of poems in my life and had them read and recited to me, but I had no formal training. There was no such thing--at least that I know of in 1979--as an MFA. Once I started writing, however, I couldn't stop. I think that's a pretty sure sign that one is a writer--when you have to write whether you always want to or not.