Featured Interview With Bill Felker
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in Marshfield, Wisconsin, a small town in the middle of the state. I pretty much wandered free as a child. My parents let me follow my inclinations to hunt with a slingshot, fish in the river, explore the adjacent park. I think that if I hadn’t been convinced to enter a Catholic seminary at the age of 14, I would have continued in that vein. But I did become a seminarian and learned Latin and entered an academic world in which I remained for decades. Although I didn’t become a priest, I stayed disconnected from my childhood pursuits until my 50s – when I stopped smoking and began, once more, to wander in the woods.
These days, I live in Yellow Springs, Ohio, am retired from almost 50 years of teaching, and am slowly returning to childhood. It’s a long road; I follow it with one old cat and one old dog, and we are trying to figure out where the road is leading.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I started writing on April 14, 1956. I was just beginning to emerge from seminary piety and said to myself, “I think I’ll write, maybe be a writer.” I started with a poem in a school notebook and have kept writing ever since. Most of my early writing was journaling, graduating to a really bad novel, then to a regular bad novel, then to a novel that I haven’t finished. By the time I got to writing for newspapers, both as a feature writer and columnist, I had put aside most of my fictional fantasies and settled in to contemplate the real world of plants and people.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite author right now is David Hinton, a scholar/translator of Chinese poetry. His latest book, Awakened Cosmos, is an exploration of life and work of the 8th-century Chinese poet, Tu Fu, and, at the same time, a rich commentary on Taoism.
Non-fiction is my favorite genre: I am always in search of ideas for my weekly radio and newspaper essays. Well, then I also read poetry. Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry are my favorites in that genre. I feel lucky to be/have been alive during their writing careers.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
One of the problems with being able to self-publish is that there is always another book to write and publish. I have just completed my annual almanac, Poor Will’s Almanack for 2021, which contains, among other things, essays on the 48 seasons of the year, a S.A.D. Stress Index (which provides a numerical value for the likelihood of stress on each day of the year), as well as farm and garden notes, weather forecasts and Americana stories from the readers of my weekly newspaper almanacs.
My latest collection of essays, Deep Time Is in the Garden: Almanac Essays in Search of Time and Place and Spirit, came out this past spring and anthologizes 40 of my favorite nature reflections that were originally written for radio and my newspaper columns, I continue to update my Daybook for the Year in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a memoir-type collection of all my nature and almanac notes from the past 40 years, published in twelve volumes (700,000 words about), and in which I write almost daily, describing what I see and feel about nature in my yard and neighborhood. As a self-publisher, I update my published Daybook annually, editing and adding at will.
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