Gerry Haslam and I used to huddle in his or my office located in the new gym at Sonoma State College, before it became Sonoma State University. It might have been his first year. I know it was mine. That was 1967. I was overwhelmed. I was the single parent of two little boys, 5 and 2, Markus and Dylan. I was still writing my PhD thesis for the stuffy German Department at UC Berkeley, where Thomas Mann’s son Golo was teaching. Whom I hardly registered and never spoke to. The Vietnam War was raging, and I was trying to find my place, without much success in the Age of Free Love. And so, in this weakened condition, I was susceptible to Gerry Haslam’s satanic whispers that he would write literature rather than be a fussy critic of other people’s creations. To me, this was a daring heresy that I could scarcely take in. I could only see that he was a rebel, and that part stuck. And so, easily influenced, I started to write, little stories here and there in German and English. Without really noticing it, I had joined the creative conspiracy, instigated for me by this kind and clever man. He had taught me the alchemy of S + W = L. storytelling plus work to make literature. One day, twenty years later, in Weimar, East Germany where Goethe and Schiller had written, I asked my mildly Marxist professor of Germanistik (pronounced with a hard g) the Faustian question, “Why analyze literature to death instead of creating literature?” The young woman was speechless and now had another reason to be suspicious of me. At age 70, I published my first novel and, in a month or so , at almost 85, I will have published my fourth novel , plus a collection of short stories—all of it historical fiction set in Mexico where Dianne Romain and I have lived for the last twenty years.
All of this, aside from the Dianne Romain part—who is also a novelist—may not have happened without those early heretical whispers from that kind and loving academic rebel, my friend and fine writer Gerry Haslam.