I have been lucky to know a lot of people with very high principles who were peace activists. Among them were academics, artists, and writers, and veterans. Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Staughton Lynd, Dave Dellinger. H. Bruce Franklin. Einstein, Meyer Schapiro, David Reisman, Richard Wilbur, and Stephen Sandy have been among my acquaintances and influences. They have inspired my life and formed my beliefs.
In the Preface to The Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth has a section titled ―Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man‖. I was born in Randolph, Vermont on eighty acres of farmland and wild pasture and we had the place for many years. I grew up there and in New York City. Nature is very important in my life and should be in every child‘s life. Living in the country makes one feel free and develops one‘s soul in ways that are not possible in an urban setting. I was very lucky in this way also.
In 1966, when I was a student at Harvard, I went on a trip to Vietnam with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). That trip changed my life. It is described in detail in the chapter ―Hanoi‖ in my memoir, Earth, Air, Fire and Water: A Memoir of the Sixties and Beyond. There was a bombing raid and I got separated from my group. As a result I met Ho Chi Minh. That meeting is described in this book.
In 2003 I flew to Iraq and saw an ambulance blowing up. This inspired me to do my collection of essays, Peace Not Terror.
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I majored in English Literature at Harvard and received my Ph.D. in English Literature from Boston College. I had wanted to be a poet since I was six years old. I took a Freshman Seminar with Stephen Sandy that encouraged me to keep writing. In the 1980, my writing expanded to short stories. Also in the 1980s, I studied art in the Boston area and had 30 shows. I have etchings in The Fogg Museum, The Smith College Museum of Art, five etchings and a plate in The Loeb Art Center at Vassar, works in the estates of Meyer Schapiro and Victor Weisskopf, and works in private collections all over the world.
My mother was an artist and an editor. She studied at the Art Students League and worked at Dodd, Mead and Farrar and Rinehart. She later did botanical drawing at The Harvard Herbarium.
My father was a world famous mathematician. He wrote, with Harold Courant, a book titled What Is Mathemathics?, higher mathematics for non-mathematicians, which was praised by Einstein and is still a classic today. His politics were left wing in the 1930s.
He went down to Harlan County to help the striking miners. He became somewhat disaffected after the Soviet Union turned into a totalitarian regime. He got Jewish dissident mathematicians out of the Soviet Union. He started a firm, Statistica, with his lawyer, for which he traveled around testifying in academic anti-discrimination cases.
My mother‘s politics were liberal. We went as a family to hear Martin Luther King, Jr.
speak in Boston and I went twice to marches in Washington during the Vietnam War. In 1999 I published Against the Vietnam War: Writings By Activists, a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Staughton Lynd, Dave Dellinger, H. Bruce Franklin, David Cortright, David Harris, Joan Baez, Carl Oglesby, and others, including veterans.
Peace Not Terror includes essays by many of the same writers. My memoir, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: A Memoir of the Sixties and Beyond, describes my upbringing in New York, Chapel Hill, and Vermont and the people my parents knew: Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Meyer Schapiro, Woody Guthrie, Carl Sandburg, Alfred Stieglitz, Alan Lomax, David Reisman.
It also describes the influence on me of several writers, including Richard Wilbur, and my relationships with Howard Zinn, Staughton Lynd, Carl Oglesby and H. Bruce Franklin when I was editing Against the Vietnam War and Peace Not Terror.
When I taught at Vassar College, from 1973 to 1976, I wrote Amelie, a book of feminist poetry, and also a lot of poetry inspired by the beautiful campus which an arboretum with plants from all over the world. After I left Vassar I wrote Lance, A Vietnam Vet: A Love Story, about the man I knew who was to become the inspiration for most of my political writing. He was in the Army in Vietnam and returned to join Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
I was a street singer for a number of years, singing and playing the guitar, and my memoir includes the libretto to a musical, ―You‘ll Never Be the Same!‖
My summers in Vermont where I was born, my life at the Putney School where I attended boarding school, and my mother‘s love of nature have informed my life and have made me extremely interested in the environmental movement.
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My book of poems, Eclipse of the Moon, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press at the end of 2010.
I am a peace activist and continue to work toward a world without war.
I run my own editorial service and have edited books published by Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, and Knopf.
Mandelstam, Myself Included and Lance, A Vietnam Vet: A Love Story are books about people I was very close to and loved extremely much. We were caught in wild and complicated circumstances, and it only by dint of great effort that I have separated one person from another.
The Vietnam War still looms large in American history and society. It colors everything.
The wars in Iraq and Vietnam show that we have not learned the lessons of Vietnam. The militarization of our society can only lead to more violence at home and abroad.
The veterans returning from Iraq are forming Iraq Veterans against the War just as the returning veterans from Vietnam formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Students for a Democratic Society still exists on campuses across the country. Antiwar movements continue to push for an end to war even as the tensions in the Middle East and Southeast Asia escalate. Human survival and the survival of the planet are at stake.