Looking for Flannel Pajamas: Selected Poems 1993-2010 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781939319005)

I am tempted to say: Very little more is known. In the deepest sense this is true, but still there are the facts. I was born north of Chicago in 1921. My pre-school years were spent with two brothers, one older and one younger, where my parents' busy household included one grandmother or the other, a story-telling laundress named Nettie Proctor. I remember trips to Schlosser's Market, Wilson's Bakery, Zick's Department Store, the green grocer's, the library, the railroad station; later, progressive Winnetka schools, Horace Mann Grade School, Skokie Junior High, and New Trier High School. Certain features demarcated my horizons - the great Lake Michigan to the east, the great prairies to the west. As my world grew wider, Chicago was central: my father's place of business, the Blakeley Printing Company on the Chicago River; Saturday excursions to the Chicago Art Institute and the Field Museum; summer trips to Canadian lakes; one year spent in the Ojai Valley; two years in Tucson where I graduated from high school, many visits to northern Mexico. All this time, I was learning, observing, and finding my way as a writer, starting first with journalism. Then love, our wildly modern house in Davenport, Iowa, my own family including three sons; my husband, Jim, our shared perspective on the world and what we should do in it. I met Jim at the University of Chicago. He came from Miles City, Montana. We were together 49 years, from 1943 until his death in 1992, with a year and a half separation during World War II. Some of his stories of growing up in Montana in the 1930's went into my young adult novel, Pistol (The New York Times 'Top Ten' in 1969). Experiences in Israel on the archaeological site became the background for the second book, The Accomplice; stories of my own life in my third novel, Wings. My sons were the models for the brothers in my fourth novel, Into The Road, three pressed into two characters. In 1992, when Jim died, I was 70, and as the survivor, I realized I faced the re-design of my life. I wanted to get back to some creative work. Yet I feared the long days of writing novels closed off in my library for a year or more. I needed projects that took me out into the world, engaged me with people. The brevity of a poem appealed to me. Now, more than 20 years later, I have a body of work, and many friends to thank for the richness of these years. Looking for Flannel Pajamas: Selected Poems 1993-2010 has come of all this.