Indiana-born in the shadow of Chicago, Rexroth’s childhood took place in a liberal household filled with socialist activity in the years before the First World War. The radical network across the Midwest that he details in his Autobiographical Novel will surprise most Americans, who believe it was confined largely to big East Coast cities. Not so, as he insists.

His family was at a less restrictive edge of the Brethren heritage, today a handful of pacifist denominations where some still resemble the Amish. It was very much a counterculture from its arrival in Colonial Pennsylvania and Maryland and on through the Civil War. While Rexroth himself headed in a much different direction, some of those roots continued to shape his actions and his religious questioning and questing.

Orphaned in his teens, he broke loose at 19, filled with anarchist thought and an IWW (Wobbly) identity, hitchhiked west, and worked odd jobs, including a Forest Service stint at the Marblemount Ranger Station in the North Cascades, where Gary Snyder would later spend several crucial summers in the high fire watch posts, as did others who came under Rexroth’s spell.

With a wife, a painter, he settled in San Francisco in 1927 as what his biographer calls “forerunners of the flower children who flocked to northern California during the fifties and sixties.” All along, he was notably active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist circles, along with jazz and Buddhist influences. His book, Communalism: from Its Origins to the Twentieth Century, remains a fine overview of counterculture communities over the centuries. In some of these circles, he was aligned with Brethren, Quakers, and Mennonites, perhaps without being fully aware of the connection. His personal life, however, had its tangles.

His translations of classic Chinese and Japanese poetry are what first caught my attention, and still do. His own works are strongly crafted, often with an erotic strand.

He’s sometimes called the father or even the heart of the Beat movement, both as a mentor and as the MC at the famed reading at San Francisco’s Gallery Six in 1955, but it would be more accurate to call him a godfather of the Bay Area poetry renaissance that began blossoming before that and flourished for several decades after. Weekly readings in his house now sound like a who’s who of literature.

I remember that when he died, about the same time John Cheever did, Cheever got the accolades in the press while Rexroth got brief mention. I still think they had it backward, considering the lasting influence of each.

Although my classmates in a contemporary novel course rhapsodized over One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the author’s later role as a Merry Prankster advocating LSD use, I was fonder of Sometimes a Great Nation, which I read while living not all that far from its setting in the coastal mountains of Oregon. Sections from the unfinished Seven Prayers of Grandma Whittier were also tantalizing. Now I am wondering about his naming of the grandmother, as a nod to … Quaker?

Kesey is fascinating as a forceful, larger-than-life counterculture celebrity, even notoriety, from the Beat movement on. How could anyone begin to compress his activities into prose, either fiction or nonfiction?

Both of his novels were published by the time he was 30. Maybe he was just too busy living to continue.

The Dakotas, as I encountered them driving a U-Haul to Washington state, are a starkly open, even disturbing space that contrasts sharply to the expanses on either side of them. Much of my writing has included unique places as an essential element, sometimes approaching the role of an actual character.

Norris’ Dakota: A Spiritual Journey came to my attention after I had relocated to northern New England and was attempting to comprehend its unique landscapes and peoples. Her insights, with all of the directness of Midwest expression, proved helpful.

The friend who recommended – or perhaps even gifted – Dakota to me had lived as an Episcopal nun, and my ashram residency was a monastic experience, so Norris’ The Cloister Walk, following up on her introduction to a Benedictine community, was more like a dialogue. Yes, monks and nuns can be prankish and have a sense of humor, and as mystics, they’re often unexpectedly practical.

Norris was welcomed as an active Presbyterian to participate in the Roman Catholic convent without any pressure of conversion. Rather, her exchanges were mutually enhancing, akin to what both my friend and I repeatedly encountered in our own religious streams.

Building on that, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith has been a helpful guide in translating key Christian words and expressions – jargon, if you will – in ways a wider contemporary audience might more clearly understand. I find it helpful to have at hand when writing directly about Biblical terms and thoughts.

Poets do make some of the finest prose writers, in my humble observation.

Another of the circle of novelists I treasure who began writing after I graduated from college is Brooklyn-born Lethem.

“Genre bending,” used to describe Lethem, is a new term for me, but hardly a new concept. It’s something I’ve long pursued, if only in resisting genres outright. His multigenerational Dissident Gardens, especially its unconventional structure, even gave me a key for redirecting the material I had been gathering for what emerged as my novel What’s Left.

His essay describing the underground Schemerhorn station in Brooklyn is my nominee for the finest writing about the New York City subway station, period. Remembering, this is coming from the author of Subway Visions.

Some of my friends had resided near his locations in Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, so the novels had some familiarity for me in addition to his takes on growing up in a hippie environment. I was especially intrigued by his treatment of his father, an outstanding contemporary painter and personal friend, as an eccentric videographer.

Now, to add Lethem’s earlier books to my TBR pile …

Her dry, acerbic approach to the subjects in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and other writings were invigorating at the time, especially when they reflected the hippie counterculture. I didn’t especially consider it New Journalism, much less its use of novelistic techniques. Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were already there, ahead of her, in my reading.

I didn’t keep up with her output, though, and returning to the early work I now see much that strikes me as dated and shallow. Maybe that’s a consequence of seeing national reporters come briefly into a locality and then write of it as if they have some authority, in contrast to what I know after longer residency.

More recently, reading Where I Was From, the account of her upbringing in central California, I felt her telling was more novelistic than actual nonfiction.

As the 21^st century got underway, I was baffled that all of the published contemporary novelists and many of its poets I admired were in place by the time I graduated from college at the beginning of the ‘70s. Where were those my own age or younger?

Yes, the publishing world was in turmoil, but that couldn’t have been the entire problem.

I was also recognizing that my native Midwest, especially as I experienced it in industrial Ohio, went unrepresented – something missing largely from Hollywood presentations as well.

And then, as I discovered Greek-American culture, I was amazed to find how little of that culture, too, existed in public awareness.

The one exception who came to light was Detroit-born Eugenides. And how!

His three novels, each one a unique take on the novel itself, address the previous blanks. For large stretches of the Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, I thought he was talking about Dayton, including the race riots of ’68. The Marriage Plot, meanwhile, looked at Quaker practice in ways that gave me confidence in the Greek-American dimension of my own novel What’s Left.

The man is a master, for sure.