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.

His wild poetics drawn on linguistics theory broke ground for a number of us. Quite simply, the narrative within a poem – or a series, as Spicer soon turned away from the single-page model – no longer had to conform with factual reality. I can only imagine what he would have done with Donald Trump as a figure. An image, however, took on a life of its own.

I didn’t realize how central the Los Angeles born character was to the West Coast poetry world. He was co-founder of the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where the Beat movement burst forth, and later in the Berkeley side of the Bay Area literary scene.

His collected poems, published posthumously by Black Sparrow and Grey Fox presses, remain core works on my bookshelf.

I also loved the way Ed Dorn picked up and continued Spicer’s stream.

My introduction to Kerouac was the 1968 Paris Review interview he gave to Ted Berrigan (accompanied by Aram Saroyan, if I recall right – they did have to crawl through a bedroom window to get around Kerouac’s watchdog wife). The idea of typing on long scrolls of teletype paper was something I certainly took up after graduation from college – many mornings I had to go into the newsroom before dawn to attend to the teletype machines and replace the rolls of paper. Nobody else was interested in the discarded bolts.

I’ve never been able to get through On the Road but have read about everything else he wrote, especially Dharma Bums. What appealed in the hippie experience of the early ‘70s was Kerouac’s narrative of similar questing for transcendental awarenesses in music and poetry, music, travel, spirituality/religion, and romantic love – often in the realities of borderline squalor. His experiments with Buddhism resonated with my early yoga, though I now see how much it was more an exploration of French-Canadian Catholicism. The jazz details the excitement of the transformations of the ‘50s and its Beat movement, history as it happened.

At the time, I didn’t realize how much Binghamton in upstate New York resembled Kerouac’s native Lowell, Massachusetts, but without the French-Canadian dimension. The rawness of his freeform narrative was nevertheless entrancing.

Eventually, when I moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, I encountered the Quebec element in the city’s West Side and then in the mills of Lowell itself. We even had obituaries for some of his distant kin who spelled the name Kirouac.

For a fact-oriented journalist like me, his dark and cloudy and openly emotional approach to a story was a revelation. As an aside, I must confess that I now see Henry Miller’s earlier stream-of-thought fiction is superior.

As for Kerouac’s celebrated and lamented Cody? I seriously doubt that he measured up to his image. But that’s a matter of being human, too.