“Arthur Standing in 1947: A Self-Interview,” by Jonathan Griffith.

Who is Arthur Standing and why 1947?

Arthur Standing was my maternal grandfather. In 1947, he was fifty-three years old, a farmer farming outside of Earlham, Iowa, in a small Quaker community. Earlham was just one of many small Quaker farming communities across the Midwest settled in the nineteenth century, a phenomenon that included other religious groups such as the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Anabaptists. The early Quakers in the Midwest dressed in plain clothes and spoke the “plain language,” using thee instead of you, for example. These religious communities were very tightly knit, with marriage to outsiders discouraged.

By 1947, Arthur had been married to my grandmother for twenty-two years, and they had two daughters—my mother Reva and her sister, my aunt Wanda. Both were away at college. If you draw a line under the date, Sunday, January 12, 1947, I believe the Arthur Standing before January 12 was not the same Arthur Standing who eventually emerged from the experience—the grandfather I knew. This wasn’t a car accident or war wound. He’d come in from chores to rest and read that Sunday morning, and then suddenly was in the throes of a convulsion. My sense is that what he experienced in his living room was something he didn’t really survive. Yet he lived another twenty-three years, dying in 1970, after a massive stroke.

You say it’s your “sense.” What do you mean?

Frustratingly, I’m not able to talk to the people who were involved. My mother and aunt both died before I started looking at the letters and other documents. I first understood that something serious had occurred while transcribing my parents’ love letters from this time. In a letter from January 19, my mother expresses worry that something is wrong with Arthur, because apparently when her sister tried to visit him in the hospital in Des Moines, “he went completely out of his head,” as she says in her letter. My antenna shot up. This was news to me.

Do you know why it was something you never heard before?

I’m not sure. I suppose it was embarrassing because it was partly a mental health issue, but what happened was kept secret from the next generation. We were told he’d quit farming in 1948 after an extended illness, which seemed to be associated with the rheumatoid arthritis he’d struggled with since 1928 when it surfaced around Wanda’s birth. No one mentioned his hospital stay for what seems to have been a mental breakdown. Years later, my mother said that he’d had an aneurysm, but it all seemed rather vague.

Were you able to find out any more information?

Yes, from my mother’s letters to my father, I knew Arthur went to the Mayo Clinic for tests on the advice of his local doctor. After several requests, a couple of years ago, Mayo sent his medical records to me. I was astounded. It was a lesson in historical research. So many of our family stories are based on half-truths or a lack of information. In family stories, we settle for a version of history, which is often more a cartoon. We don’t hack their content or their impact because the family consensus on its history and identity is sacrosanct. No one wants to have instances of mental illness in their family history. The story that Arthur quit farming in 1948 was true, but that it was caused by his rheumatoid arthritis was only half-true.

It sounds like you think most family stories are suspect.

I do. It seems to be in our nature to simplify events. We unconsciously shape stories, often with an agenda to save face or uphold an image of the family. We need a constant counterbalance to that tendency. What happened to Arthur in 1947 had a huge impact on the family into the next generations. I wrote the Iowa Methodist Hospital where he had stayed for a time after the convulsions, but those records were destroyed. If the Mayo Clinic hadn’t retained their records, I would never have known the nature of his illness. I would have believed my mother’s account—Arthur’s rheumatoid arthritis caused him to leave farming for good in 1948. No doubt the rheumatoid arthritis was a major factor. My mother’s first cousin tells the story of my grandfather screaming because of the pain he was in as he tried to get out of his car. But the convulsions of 1947 were a different beast altogether, and he didn’t recover.

What did the records from the Mayo Clinic say?

They’re hard for a lay person to understand, but it’s clear they were giving him a full neurological work-up. He first went to Rochester, Minnesota, in April, and then returned for a follow-up that October. I imagine my worried grandmother driving the 240 miles from Earlham to Rochester with him in the passenger seat. This was pre-interstate America, the roads winding through small prairie towns. He’d been prescribed phenobarbital by his local doctor, so he was in no shape to help her drive. I don’t know how long he ended up taking the medication. Phenobarbital, an anti-convulsive, is addictive. Did addiction contribute to his long, slow recovery? A note from the October Mayo visit said that Arthur was sleeping ten to eleven hours at night. How much of that was the phenobarbital? Before January 12, he’d been a hard worker on the farm, and then he could barely cope. The diagnosis that his doctors settled on was “indeterminate intracranial lesion—improving.”

That sounds like they didn’t know.

Yes, it does sound like that. It seems they believed a lesion in the brain was the cause of his convulsions. “Brain lesion” is a broad term, indicating damaged brain tissue that can have many causes. In April, his lab reports stated that he had an “intracranial calcification in left frontal region near the midline. May be an intracranial neoplasm.” Apparently, these calcifications are often unaccompanied by any evidence of disease and can have no demonstratable cause. Remember that in 1947 MRIs didn’t exist. What would we understand about his condition now if he were to enter Massachusetts General Hospital, for example, for a diagnosis? But I’m sure he was getting first-class care for the time at the Mayo Clinic.

How does it make you feel to know this?

Disturbed. Arthur seemed depressed when I knew him. He was very passive and didn’t speak up for himself. It was hard for him even to ask for seconds at the table. He was tall for his generation with dark hair that thinned by middle age—a dead ringer for his mother, who had the same long face and very dark eyebrows. You’d occasionally see a spark of a sense of humor, but mostly he seemed locked inside himself. Once when both our family and Wanda’s family were there for Easter, we had a massive Easter egg hunt in the backyard. The kids were madly running around. One of the last candy eggs to be found was tucked behind the handle of an old water pump, and Arthur, walking by with his cane, stopped, pulled it out, and held it up, asking who wanted it, with a chorus of “me, me, me” around him. He looked at his grandchildren and then just popped it into his own mouth, with a smile.

My aunt Wanda was best at teasing him. She’d wrap joke Christmas presents for him—an old fork elegantly wrapped in a big box or a an old-timey pair of men’s underwear. He always had childlike anticipation about his Christmas presents, and then everyone would laugh, including Arthur, when he’d discover what was in the box. He seemed fooled every time.

My grandmother’s main job after the 1947 event was his care, although he did eventually recover enough to take janitorial work at the Farm Bureau building in Primghar, Iowa, where they moved in 1948, while renting the farm. His mother, Mary Alice Standing, was living with them at the time of his breakdown, so she was also part of the whole process of moving. In her early eighties and a widow, she died in 1949 in Primghar but was buried back in Earlham. Between the care for Arthur and for her mother-in-law between 1947 and 1949, my grandmother must have had a difficult time. Perhaps part of the reason for the move back to her home community was to get her family’s support.

Most of my information about Arthur before 1947 comes from two sets of letters—one from 1919, when he worked for the Friends Reconstruction Unit after World War I building kit houses for French families who lost everything in the war, and from my grandmother’s love letters written to him in 1924. Even though his replies haven’t survived in the latter collection, the letters show two people excited to join forces and try to thrive economically.

Arthur was thirty years old at the time he was courting Lydia and ready to make a life. He dressed sportily. He bought his first car, a 1924 Ford Coupe, in the summer of 1924 so he could drive from Earlham to Paullina to bring my grandmother Lydia back to Earlham for his brother’s wedding and for a visit to the state fair in Des Moines. He bought my grandmother a diamond ring that same summer as a present, which was likely considered ostentatious by some in their Quaker communities. This hardly seems like the Arthur I knew.

But even more surprising and incongruous are the events around his 1919 stint in France. He fell in love with a young French girl named Paulette Rouzet and seems to have wanted to marry her, something his family apparently rejected. In none of the family’s letters back to him is Paulette mentioned, a kind of shunning typical of those midwestern small sect religious communities.

From his letters, we learn that he was a frequent dinner guest at the Rouzet household, where he was offered wine (he declined). Paulette’s father was a well-known printer in Dole and had built a beautiful family home that still survives. In his letters, Arthur is ecstatic over Paulette. They go rowing on the river, and he plays tennis with her on Sunday morning. He plays catch with her younger brother, with a baseball and glove that he brought with him from the United States. Her family’s life must have been eye-opening for Arthur. He took a photo of her standing in the doorway of her family home, her hands behind her back, looking directly at the camera, at him.  

There is evidence that he and Paulette wrote to each other after his return to Earlham at the end of 1919. A December 1921 letter from Paulette survives in which she suggests they can be friends. Her family says that Paulette meticulously kept journals, but those from that time were destroyed by her. This may have been a painful event for both Arthur and Paulette. They simply couldn’t find a way to take their relationship forward.

Why is this important?

Arthur’s year in France was the greatest anomaly of his life. He seemed beaten down by the time I knew him. I thought his passiveness, his inwardness, was his personality, but that can’t be true based on the person he was in 1919. He made the choice in 1919 to let his family dictate his future. I suppose, given his upbringing, that was bound to happen, but what if he’d stayed in France with Paulette?

We know he had trouble forgetting her. She even comes up in the courting letters of 1924 when my grandmother asks him if they were to ever break up, would he return to his “little French girl”? And he apparently insisted on honoring Paulette by calling my mother Reva Paulette at her birth in 1926.

In an oil painting he did later in life after my grandparents’ one trip to Europe, he places a lone young woman on a hill overlooking the Rhine. Even though the location of the painting is supposedly Germany, I don’t think it’s a stretch to identify the girl in the painting as being Paulette. He was pressured to return home, which meant he never saw her again. Paulette’s family knew her as a very intelligent, sensitive person, so it seems he gave up something valuable. This is a digression from his medical records, but in 1919, amid terrible suffering in post-war France, he got a taste of a life of culture and conversation. Paulette’s father was apparently a remarkable man. Of course, if Arthur remained in France, I wouldn’t be here!

Paulette Rouzet, Dole, France, 1919.

Arthur Standing, Dole, France, 1919, in his FRU uniform.

The notes from his first Mayo visit in April 1947 would scare anyone. Here is the narrative that the attending physician compiled about his convulsions on January 12, 1947:

At 9:30 a.m. Arthur felt like head swimming a little. Sat down. His wife says he then went out of house and did some morning work, but he has no memory of this. At 10 a.m. wife thought he was reading. At 10:30 a.m. while sitting on couch he cried out and went into a generalized clonic convulsion. Arms were drawn up in [illegible]; legs were tense and moved rhythmically. He became a “white-blue” in color, saliva coming from mouth. There was some blood in saliva. Consciousness was lost. The convulsion lasted 2 minutes. After this he was unconscious for about 15 minutes when he had a repetition of the same clonic convulsion lasting 1–2 minutes. At about 11:00 a.m. consciousness was regained, but he was confused. He then became sleepy. Was taken to the hospital. For about one week he was confused and had very little memory. At the hospital, right hemi-cranial headaches were first noted. These seemed to be a dull steady ache and brought about by nervous fatigue and anxiety. Was examined by a neurologist who found no cause for the convulsion. He has been tired, easily fatigued, is upset by long visits. But he is gradually improving in mental relaxation, is gaining strength, and headaches are less severe.

They ruled out a brain tumor. One curious note was under the heading “Emotion.” It says: “elated at moments.”

What is that about?

I’m not sure. Could it be mood swings? Maybe a hint of what we now call bipolar disorder? Upon his return to the Mayo Clinic in October 1947, a lot has changed regarding his circumstances. My aunt Wanda quit college to help. The Earlham Echo notes in the March 27 edition that “Wanda Standing has given up her school work at Penn College and will stay home to help her parents.” Two days later, another Echo entry notes that “Arthur Standing is slowly improving, he puts his time in painting crayon pictures.”

Astonishingly, both Wanda and my mother, Reva, married in the summer of 1947. My aunt married a fellow Iowa Quaker, and the two of them remained at my grandparents’ house to help on the farm. My mother married my father, a war resister from South Carolina, who had spent two years in federal reformatory for refusing to register for the draft in 1942. By the time Arthur returned to Mayo in October, both sisters were pregnant, or very soon to be, with Arthur’s first grandchildren born in July 1948. In the October check-up, a doctor notes that the patient was “shocked” by the marriage of his daughters over the summer. We don’t know what the shock was, but perhaps in his state, Arthur was upset by any changes. In my mother’s letters from 1947, she noted that Arthur became agitated whenever he was separated from my grandmother.

Lydia Standing and Arthur Standing with Reva, 1926.

The Arthur Standing Family, 1948 (John Griffith and Reva Griffith are on the right, with their firstborn, Chris).

I’ve pulled the narrative notes out of the records for his October visit. It seems he was improving slowly.

·       Return at this time for 6 mo. Check-up as advised by Dr. Carlisle in April 47; otherwise, wouldn’t be here.

·       No convulsions since last here.

·       Has had daily mild dull headaches. Comes on when he is tired or “nervous” at the end of the day. Fever keep(s) him awake or awakens him. Cold packs relieve. Thinks they are bi-frontal with rt. side more severe than left. Wife says his rt. eye droops during the HA [?].

·       Wife says since Jan. ’47 he snores when he sleeps.

·       No dizziness.

·       He occasionally has ringing or buzzing in the ears at the end of a hard day’s work.

·       No change in speech & he thinks his speech is the same as it has been all his life. He had English parents & very few contacts with outsiders as a youngster & he thinks that he has an English accent which we interpret as an impediment.

·       His main trouble is nervousness. By this he means being upset and unable to get to sleep either after visiting with people or when problems arise in connection with his farm. Ten days ago, a plane crashed in a nearby farm and in bed at night the ticking of the clock seems to vibrate through his entire body. Also, a jar of the bed post by his wife walking by vibrates through him. The white tablets (phenobarbital) relieve his nervousness about ½ hour after he takes them.

·       Wife says patient can’t stand responsibility—gets headaches, lies down, and doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Because of this he has rented his farm out.

·       Patient says the thing that does him the most good is his hobby—painting—uses pastels.

·       Rheumatism hasn’t bothered.

·       His two daughters got married this summer and that “shocked” patient.

A lot to consider, but it doesn’t sound like ten months after the convulsions he’s back to his pre-convulsion self. The fact that my grandmother identifies an unwillingness on his part to take responsibility says a lot here. She was always a doer, a worker. What was the tone of that comment? Was it anger, frustration? They left the farm the next year, moving to northwest Iowa near her family, renting the farm out until the 1960s when my aunt and her family moved there.

You might not think of farming as a stressful occupation, but it was. Farmers have many more tools available to them now to help make decisions. Better weather forecasts, for example. And remember, by 1947, they’d farmed through the Great Depression, and it couldn’t have been easy. Arthur loved farming and even in his 1919 letters from France, as the eldest son, he had strong opinions about how the family farm back home should be run.

In Arthur’s Quaker community, it was a given that he’d become a farmer, but it seems farming became too much for him. The janitorial job was less stressful, more straightforward about what he had to accomplish. He just cleaned the building every day. His two joys in his life seemed to be his painting and growing flowers. Between his rheumatoid arthritis and what I believe was a long-term depression, he lived a difficult life.

What do you take from this?

What interests me is that the grandfather I knew was a different person before January 12, 1947. What we grandchildren experienced was someone who seemed incredibly passive and somewhat childish. If he had a story to tell, it was locked inside him with the rest of his emotional life.

We know he was in a lot of pain from his rheumatoid arthritis, but there was feeling that he just couldn’t handle the complexity of life. Compared to my Griffith grandfather, who seemed vitally involved with life into his eighties, Arthur had given up. My ever-present grandmother was always there though, helping him through whatever challenges they faced.

Why is this important to you?

That’s a good question. My mother struggled with depression for much of her life. She thought of it very generically though. It was a long-term illness she felt she would never get over. She apparently had no curiosity about its causes. We learned from my father after her death that she had terrible post-partum depression. He said that for a time she was afraid she would kill us children and wanted Dad to tie her body to his at night, so he’d wake up if she got up. That must have been a terrible time for her!

Now I can see the depression in her face in pictures from the 1950s when my brothers and I were young. Her eyes were often lidded. She gained a lot of weight. I’m sorry there wasn’t more help for her. She had four babies between 1947 and 1954. It was too much, but culturally at the time, the World War II generation were having babies.

My mother’s depression made her very empathetic with people who were experiencing rough patches. That empathy was a kind of sweet thing about her, but she really didn’t have much to offer them beyond an acknowledgement that they were suffering. Over the years, several people have mentioned that she was helpful during their hard times. I believe she was. My problem was that she always seemed more comfortable with depressed people than people who were happier in their lives. I had to fight the feeling that she liked me better if I seemed sad or depressed.

What was it like to have a mother so sympathetic to depression?

On the one hand, it was like having this warm blanket to put around you whenever you felt bad. On the other hand, that warm blanket came at a cost. She made it easy to believe that you didn’t have to work to solve problems. Her father’s history must have been evidence to her about the inevitability of depression in the Standing family. That inevitability was a huge unconscious message from her. It was something I had to confront in myself.

I remember after my oldest brother Chris’s murder in 1984, I went into therapy. I was depressed by his murder. I developed a kind of OCD and couldn’t leave our house without checking the doors multiple times. My therapist and the psychiatrist working with her were convinced that my depression was the result of genetics—that all I needed was to take antidepressants for the rest of my life.

The idea of a genetic basis for depression was big at the time. I bought into it for a while. Initially, I felt relieved, but finally threw it off. Their answer to take a pill, develop some fun activities, settle into a job with less stress was frankly BS. The history of my grandfather and mother played right into this interpretation. But my brother’s violent murder was a trauma to my psyche. It had nothing to do with genetics! If I’d followed their advice, I’d have been much more passive in my life. I would have been let off the hook, in a way, from having to work to understand how to make the life I wanted and be the person I wanted to.

You aren’t a proponent of genetics being the cause of depression?

Who knows how much genetics plays into this? I’m no expert. But no, I’m not a big fan of this approach as a single cause for depression. A legacy of depression came down through Arthur and my mother, but I don’t leap to the conclusion that genetics completely explains it. The legacy from Arthur seems to be about a tendency to give up and feel that life is too complex to sort out.

So many of our ways of relating to our world—our bodies, other people, ourselves, our physical world—are formed unconsciously, often from early trauma in ourselves and in family members before us. We want to think we are making rational decisions, and maybe we are sometimes, but we often bring old baggage from the past with us and apply it unconsciously to the present.

So, the answer is therapy?

I’m not saying that. However we do it, our job is to uncover how those unconscious responses obscure the present moment. I believe my therapist was offering me a way to give up in the face of life’s difficulties, and for a short time, I fell into that trap. It dovetailed neatly with the emotional messages from my mother. For my mother, depression was oddly a sign of sensitivity and wisdom. Happy people were shallow! Depressed people were a secret society who understood what was what.

What assumptions would you question about Arthur’s experience?

First, I’d want to understand what Arthur felt about Paulette. We know absolutely nothing about the impact that leaving her had on him. He returned home in 1919 but didn’t marry until 1925. I understand she also married much later. Once he made that decision, it was like choosing an alternate universe—Paulette’s household was very different from his own.

Secondly, I’d want to look at his childhood in what was essentially a small-sect religious community. There was something beautiful about those small communities, with their ethic of helping each other and their constant communal striving toward moral and spiritual ideals, but they were also limiting and repressive. Remember Arthur’s comments during the Mayo visit that his childhood was very isolated. They had few contacts with outsiders.

In Quaker communities, anger was not allowed, and dreams of wanting more were repressed. Repression of anger can contribute to illness. When I heard the Canadian psychiatrist Gabor Maté speak about this phenomenon, I understood what he was saying immediately. Fear of anger paradoxically results in living a life consumed with anger, all the while you put on a calm exterior. A recipe for illness.

Finally, I wish I better understood his religious beliefs. In his 1919 letters he wrote very beautifully and poetically about seeing God in nature. He believed he was living God’s will. What did Arthur end up believing, particularly after 1947? It’s hard to imagine the struggle he went through every day and how he might reconcile this suffering to God’s will. Why is this important? My mother equated intense religious feelings with sadness. I can’t speak for my brothers, but she wanted me to follow in her footsteps in this regard. This religious sadness was such a given in my life that I still can’t quite get my hands around it and its effect on me. For some reason, she wanted me to be one of the chosen with her. We were to be sad together—forever. I wonder if Arthur felt this way too.

Some people might say you’re trashing your grandfather’s and grandmother’s memories.

I’m sure you’re right, but I hope I’m giving life to their experience. Arthur wasn’t a cartoon. Just because he didn’t speak about his experience doesn’t mean that inside he had no emotional life. What was he thinking in his mind about himself? In 1947, he gave up. His life force seemed gone, but he still had twenty-three more years to live. That’s disturbing. When your life force is gone, there’s nothing pushing you forward. I wish he’d had a life without so much suffering.

In his youth, this was a person who was very literate and engaged. Suddenly, he couldn’t seem to manage anything. How could this have happened? It’s not funny or explained away as being some kind of foible, a word my mother often used. What happened to him in 1947 was consciously or unconsciously deemed a family secret, and family secrets are dangerous.

What do you mean?

People think family secrets can be swept under the rug, and they won’t have any power, but that’s not what happens. Without exposing them to the light of day, they have more power. They end up being something hidden in the darkness that controls people. I don’t know, for example, why my mother didn’t have more curiosity about these events of 1947, since they had such a dramatic impact on her life. I suspect she was afraid to open that door. In unguarded moments, she could say insightful things, but the next day, these insights were forgotten, swallowed, gone. I think she was afraid of where they might lead.

You need to be more specific.

OK. When I was younger, I thought of my Grandfather Standing as a weak person. This isn’t shocking if you knew him as we grandchildren did. We knew, for example, that he was in pain much of the time from his rheumatoid arthritis. He walked with a hitch and used a cane, which he kept with other canes by the back door, so they could be easily reached. He had his chair in the living room where he installed himself after dinner or on the weekends with his leg propped up, cane leaned against the arm. Their house in Primghar, Iowa, was on a couple of acres, where they had a big garden, some fruit trees, and they sometimes kept a few sheep. He liked to grow flowers, particularly gladiolas, which he sold by putting out a sign on the highway that ran by their house. We were always aware, or made aware, of his physical problems. At family dinners with the two families and my grandparents present, he rarely talked. I don’t remember him engaging in a serious conversation. Those things in themselves don’t make him weak, but he seemed childish in a way, as if he had to be protected, as if he were too fragile to be held accountable. That’s never a good situation. When that happens, and someone is deemed not responsible or accountable, it leaves a vacuum. It’s not a good thing in relationships.

My mother would cry when she was confronted about something she said or did, as if she were too fragile to question. You could say that was part of her personality, but I don’t think it was a given. It was something she learned. I’ve experienced this way of relating to difficult situations in myself—the feeling that life is too complicated, or, as my mother was wont to say, life is hard—and you want to be let off the hook. I’ve learned the warm feelings generated by this way of seeing the world are dangerous and need to be confronted.

I believe the title of the writer/actor/director Sarah Polley’s memoir Run Towards the Danger (2022). It’s hard to do that, to turn toward the things that challenge us and make us feel uncomfortable. It’s taken some time for me to understand that the tenseness I feel when confronted with complicated situations, particularly anger, was learned. It’s not a reality inherent in the situation. I can still feel those feelings though. But when I see them arise, I have to remind myself that I’m not a victim. I just have to deal with the situation.

The fear of our unconscious content, of acknowledging the stream of thoughts and images flowing through our minds, the unwillingness to open our lives, the fear of anger and its sources—all this seems wrapped up in Arthur’s legacy that came down through my mother. It might have been helpful for me to know Arthur’s story sooner, but it was kept a secret.

If you had a chance to ask Arthur one question now, what would it be?

I’d go back to what happened in 1919 with Paulette and ask him why he gave up so quickly. I know rejecting his family’s wishes would have led to shunning, but he didn’t seem to put up a fight. His parents weren’t cruel people. If he’d insisted, he might have convinced them, but instead he came home. He was at a crossroads. He must have known that the decision to go home was irrevocable.

I believe there are times when your interior life demands that you take certain actions, to open up to life. I believe that Arthur in 1919 was at such a point. If you act, it feels as if the world is opening to you. But it’s actually the opposite. It’s you opening to the world. Your assumptions about yourself and the world are challenged in the process. Opportunities arise that seemed previously impossible. Who might he have become if he stayed in France with Paulette? If you don’t act, as Arthur chose, you turn inward. He must have felt his world had shrunk when he returned to Iowa, his place in the family now is given. That choice was part of his legacy. When I married my wife, Jeri, my parents thought she wasn’t the right person for me, and we paid for it in various ways over the years in my relationship with them. I think they wanted someone more malleable! If I’d let them influence me, I’d have missed so much. Of course, the pressures in the situation were different for Arthur and me. But still. . . maybe giving up developed into a legitimate option for him, as his world became increasingly complex. Yeah . . . I think that’s what I’d ask.

A native Iowan, Jonathan Griffith is a 1974 graduate of Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and a 1978 graduate of the University of Iowa Fiction Writing Workshop, He has published stories and essays in literary quarterlies, including Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, The San Antonio Review, and the North American Review. He lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, with his wife and collaborator, artist and writer, Jeri Griffith, their friend Nancy, and two beagles named Molly and Ruby.