Another of the novelists to enter my elite circle of influences recently, Banks addressed the working-class lives of northern New England and upstate New York. He included also darkness, despair, and grit that feel real, rather than at a bit of distance. There’s a heft I found missing from some others, like Carolyn Chute’s Beans of Egypt, Maine or Ernest Hebert’s Darby Chronicles of New Hampshire, not that they aren’t informative.

The Sweet Hereafter is my favorite so far in that vein, though I should also mention The Darling, which shifts the action to Liberia and the focus to failed political activism.

With 21 volumes of fiction to his name, my TBR pile gets deeper.

He also has me recalling Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, which I had thought was his.

My poetry efforts bloomed burgeoned in two periods. The first was in the decade after I left the ashram, culminating in my four years in the Pacific Northwest. The second was in my first two decades in New England.

Bly came center stage for me in that second round as I began working increasing in Deep Image directions, without yet having heard the term.

Bly, as it turned out, was a major proponent of the concept. I did find his essays very helpful, especially the idea of riding a dragon or even the dragon smoke, along with the ways we humans think with three brains and his criticism of most English poetry as being miniature sermons.

His own work and much of what he translated is infused with a darkness I hadn’t found in the Beat-based poetry of the San Francisco renaissance, including the Northwest.

The majority of the writers I’ve most admired possessed a strong sense of place, and Bly was no exception. His return to rural Minnesota after Harvard and Norway is a prime example.

While he’s also lauded as a founder of the men’s movement, I had been working in other fronts of the issue and found Iron John rather forced as an argument. Gary Snyder’s earlier Dimensions of a Haida Myth impressed the importance of folktales on me much more.

Reading that his examinations of male identity sprang from the emotional crisis he encountered after being divorced by his first wife, Carol, leads to the questions of how much she shaped his earlier work and quite possibly what followed. Her short stories are memorable. When she died in 2007, she was hailed as Minnesota’s lioness of letters.

A public reading he gave with his close friend Donald Hall in Concord, New Hampshire, remains memorable. Throughout their careers, they mailed new work to each other for critique before showing it elsewhere. Their styles were so different. The reading itself came shortly after the death of Hall’s wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and was in her honor.

As a Reed College student, Whalen lived in a rooming house with Gary Snyder and Lou Welch, making for a trio of fine poets. There, through Snyder, he was introduced to Zen Buddhism after earlier dabbling in Vedanta yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. In time, he would emerge as an ordained priest at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Although suicide cut Welch’s life short, Whalen and Snyder remained close friends for life. I had no idea just how close until coming across David Schneider’s biography of Whalen, where the appear as complementary opposites – little brother helping bigger brother through key shifts in survival.

They were considered Beat poets from the start of the movement but soon moved away from its poetic conventions. Whalen, preoccupied with the movements of the human mind and awareness, blended mundane details immediately before him with timeless, erudite quotations from a world of sources. The results were a unique and absorbing mental dance on an unseen energy field.

I also enjoyed his novel, You Didn’t Even Try, dealing with a failed marriage.

He came a long way from the Dalles, a village along the Columbia River in Oregon where the eastern desert begins.

Blame Susan Sontag for the introduction, but she was right in lauding the erotic achievement of the pseudonym French author only recently revealed to be Anne Cecile Desclos.

While many of the once shocking practices in The Story of O and its companion volume have become common knowledge in the years since publication, other parts remain contentious. I’ll leave the subject matter there.

What fascinates me as a writer is the spare, even lacy, language that develops the story. O herself says very little and next to nothing is revealed about her background – there’s nothing at all about her family – yet everything is shown as if we’re inside her head. Somehow, Reage skirts being prescient in the mater-of-fact telling. We learn more background about other characters’ families, in fact. When it comes to scurrilous events, she avoids dwelling in detail but hints briefly and quite effectively moves on. As for cliché? Minimal.

Let that be a reminder to some of us who would otherwise produce too much information for our readers at certain points of our own drafting.

You can add Baker to my elite circle of treasured novelists who began publishing after I graduated from college.

Start with his ability to look in depth where others haven’t gone – the phrase “literary microscopy” fits him to a T. Sometimes what he investigates is right in front of us, perhaps an escalator in an office building or a thermometer for a daughter’s baby bottle or a common book of matches on a sequence of icy winter mornings. Other times his focus is on portent issues in world affairs like Human Smoke in the buildup to World War II, the outbreak of Covid-19, where he was the first, in “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” to argue the coronavirus was manmade and spread by accident, or the destruction of paper archives in major libraries.

I like the way he generally alternates a volume of fiction with another of nonfiction before returning to fiction, works of originality and high quality in either vein. As a craftsman, he’s impeccable, whether with 250-word sentences that flow seamlessly or fiction that’s footnoted. He writes with cool passion and an irrepressible conscience, even in the three volumes of erotica that led the New York Times magazine to dub him the Mad Scientist of Smut.

My favorite novel is The Everlasting Story of Nory, where nothing seems to happen in the first 50 pages, befitting the thoughts and expectations of a nine-year-old girl spending a year with her parents in England. Brace yourself for the tension that follows, though.