This was the featured lecture for the Whitworth University Annual Writing Awards in 2025. It’s part of Professor Peter Moe’s “How I Learned to Write” series, where each year (in his capacity as director of the university writing program) he asks a featured speaker to take on that theme.
Hi, everyone. Here’s a poem.
"Sick"
“I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
“I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I’m going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I’ve counted sixteen chicken pox
And there’s one more--that’s seventeen,
And don’t you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut--my eyes are blue--
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I’m sure that my left leg is broke--
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button’s caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle’s sprained,
My ‘pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow’s bent, my spine ain’t straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is--what?
What’s that? What’s that you say?
You say today is… Saturday?
G’bye, I’m going out to play!”
That’s by Shel Silverstein, who wrote Where the Sidewalk Ends. I loved that book when I was a kid. Just the delight Silverstein took in silly words and preposterous twists, and the little insubordinations, horrors, and vulgarities that would explode inside his poems. “There is a place,” Silverstein wrote, “where the sidewalk ends / and before the street begins, / and there the grass grows soft and white, / and there the sun burns crimson bright, / and there the moon-bird rests from his flight / to cool in the peppermint wind.” Beautiful and ridiculous, and he made me want to do things with words, too.
Also, fact, and don’t be jealous: When I was a kid, the sidewalk ended in front of my own house. That’s just the truth. At first there was just a big field there, where I would fly kites and where sometimes actual hot air balloons would land. Cool. And then they spent some years building up that field into a neighborhood, which was also cool because we’d ride our bikes around the half-finished homes—and sometimes into them. There are nice families back in Indiana whose living rooms and hallways were visited by my 1980s Schwinn bike long before the families started asking visitors to please take off their shoes inside the house. A little touch of coaster brake insubordination there. Eventually the whole field became a whole neighborhood, and the sidewalk moved on. One thing can become another thing. Edges can become centers. There are visions and revisions and a million different ways to make all the pieces turn into new things. Watching that happen to the field next door is part of how I learned to write, I think.
Now here’s a haiku:
There was a frog who
Hopped along and did sing a
Very merry tune.
That’s it. That’s not a great haiku. I wrote it myself, though, in first grade, or probably second. The “did sing” thing came from my teacher, who was right to disagree with me about the number of syllables in “hopped,” which is one, not two. There’s only one syllable in hopped, no matter how many hops you hop. Hold that thought.
When I was nineteen and in London with a study abroad trip, poetry scansion and syllable counting started to make actual sense to me, where before it had seemed a little inscrutable. Scansion is tracking with the accented syllables and rhythms inside writing, and especially inside poems. And I had a moment reading monument inscriptions where I could really hear the iambs, at last. You know something about iambs because you met them, more or less, studying Shakespeare in high school; Shakespeare liked to put five in a line to turn it into “iambic pentameter,” and that made his lines roll smoothly: “da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM,” or “i AM, i AM, i AM, i AM, i AM,” or better, “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?” (In Shakespeare, that light is Juliet, and Romeo is creeping up in the bushes. You might remember.) So picture me staring hard at carved stone and tapping the rhythm on my side because I can really, really hear it now. And eventually this one girl told me to stop that with the tapping because it was annoying. (There’s no rest of the story of that one girl. That’s her whole contribution to my literary life.)
But after that, with more rhythm in me, I can go back to the first draft of my frog haiku and know it would have scanned perfectly as two lines of iambic tetrameter, where the frog just “sang” his tune instead of doing that “did sing” thing. My teacher’s intervention fixed it into conventional 5-7-5 haiku format but converted one of my iambs to a spondee and another to a trochee. That’s fine. Maybe that’s what was interesting enough to lodge the poem in my brain for half a century. And I didn’t know I was making iambs, anyway. And this is all too technical. What I’m getting at is this: There’s joy in the sound of words joining up and coming apart and careening into each other, just as words and sounds. I didn’t really learn that at school, or touring English churches. It’s what was getting into my bones and joints when I read Shel Silverstein or sang at church or heard the radio or used “who’s it?” rhymes to kick off neighborhood games.
You might know those rhymes. “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe,” and “Bubble gum, bubble gum, in a dish…” That sort of thing. “I cannot go to school today.” “There was a frog who hopped along.” And he sang. There’s music in the words, and there are rhythms, just like there’s a rhythm to the ways we walk and run and squirm every day. When words capture those rhythms, they go big. They do more.
Here’s a different starting point: In 1990 I was 14 years old, and I was watching MTV; they were running their Aerosmith Rockumentary. That’s a documentary for rock music, in case you missed out on olden-days Music Television. Rockumentary. You get it. And Aerosmith was a loud, absolutely foul-mouthed rock band from the 70s, and they would set off double-entendres like naughty fireworks in the teenage night, and here came the band’s singer scat-rapping lyrics from not even one of their best songs, and it sounded incredible. He was making words ricochet like loose marbles on tile, and he punctuated all that by snick-ing open an actual switchblade. Charming. Entrancing. Everybody, listen: You want to learn to write, then find yourself a trashy street poet who can make your brain fall in love with just the sound of words. Don’t make him your life model or anything, but do follow him into the sound, if you can.
“There was a frog who hopped along.” And he sang. And he had a switchblade. And it was delightful, so I followed him.
James—the one from the book of James—called the tongue “a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body” that “corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” Which is bad. Words make all kinds of trouble, actually. I majored in English, which is a way of majoring in words, and words make trouble, so that’s concerning. But they also make beauty. They also praise God, which James says they should do all the time. Words are obviously the oldest magic on Earth. God used them to speak the world into existence, Genesis says, and then He had Adam use them to name the animals. World-shaping magic. And then the serpent used words for deception. World un-doing magic. Words dismay, and they delight.
Now, I had an assignment for this address, and it was to tell you how I learned to write. You may be getting the idea that I’m not sure how I learned to write, and that’s probably true. Hang in there. I think there are two pieces: The sounds and the meanings. The delight and the power in both of those, and all the places I picked up clues about how to stitch them together—sounds and meanings.
There was a book in a closet in our basement called Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, by Al Jaffee of MAD Magazine. It was my granddad’s book, I think, and all his stuff that ended up at our house was just a little suspicious. Just a little verboten. In this little book, there would be an illustration of someone asking a silly question, and then there would be a set of possible barbed responses and also a blank inviting you to make up your own additional sharp riposte. “Is it safe?” the woman asks the pharmacist. “We’ve never had any complaints from the people who’ve taken it—God rest their souls,” he replies, in one of three variations.
I found the Snappy Answers book online and flipped through it, virtually. I’m not saying it’s so good you should go out and find it, but I do remember some of the punchlines and rhythms, decades later. And that’s really something. I remembered the timing of a joke about a guy named Ziglveit B. Shtoonk whose snappy comebacks about being named Rock Hudson finally resulted in the real movie star Rock Hudson kerang-ing him on the head with an umbrella. It had timing, and it had music, and it stuck the line “Well, I’m Rock Hudson!” into my subconscious forever.
There was a frog that did sing, and I’m Rock Hudson. With a switchblade.
It would be too much to say this book was the key to my education in logic, but it was surely part of my education in logic. How one thought can follow the next in more or less valid ways. You read joke books and comics. You pick through young adult mysteries. You listen to sermons. You listen to stand up comics and movie monologues. You listen to your friends. You think about how one thought might lead smoothly and justly to the next, because you can see that’s part of what words do and what people do. You get better at it. Some books that seemed stupendously complex when you were eight start to seem simple. Harder books unlock, and they teach you even more about how one thing can lead to the next, and about how much can be next.
So I think that when you get beautiful sounds and clean logic together, you’re really getting somewhere good. You start to have and know humor. The more jokes you get, the more jokes you get. You start to understand case-making and big, twisty logical structures. Sherlock Holmes deduces answers and crisply lays out the facts so as to move his hearers, and it becomes deeply satisfying to watch that unfold. You need the sounds, and you need the meanings. Sometimes you get it all from Shakespeare, and you can tell everyone about that old guy. Sometimes you get it all from middle school playground humor—which is its own profound genre—and you can’t repeat it to your mom. Or to anybody.
But soft what light through yonder window breaks: ‘Tis a frog with a switchblade, and what a mouth on that guy.
I sometimes teach a poem, “Ducks” by Naomi Shihab Nye, about a girl in Iraq who reads books about the world, and the books get into her soup and her mirror, she says: Her sustenance and her sense of herself. That sounds right. All writers, asked to explain how they learned to write, resort to anecdotes and moments. You end up talking about finding books that took over your brain.
So, like this: I knew about the three musketeers from Hollywood movies, so I read the 1844 novel, which is harder than the movies, but pretty awesome. Alexandre Dumas has one of his three musketeers say this: “In general, people only ask for advice…[so] that they may not follow it or if they should follow it that they may have somebody to blame for having given it.” I have been thinking about that for forty years, just about.
I read J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis when I was a kid, and they did good things for my voice and my sense of how to think with and alongside stories. For better and for worse, though, the English writer who shaped my early writing most was probably Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a funny and stupendous book. Listen to this line about alien spacecraft coming to Earth: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” A line like that re-tunes a guy’s sense of pacing and humor, especially if he’s about thirteen. Or listen to Adams’s character Dirk Gently describing his low-rent office: “‘The light works,’ he said, indicating the window, ‘the gravity works,’ he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. ‘Anything else we have to take our chances with.’” Etched into my brain, and I found these books because the woman working at the bookstore saw I was about to buy the novelization of Willow, the 1988 Ron Howard fantasy movie. Try this instead, she said, seeing my mistake. Good thing. Willow should only be a movie. The Hitchhiker’s Guide was for reading. It grew new pathways all over my brains, such as they were and are.
During my junior year of high school, I was part of a little group that revived our dormant high school newspaper. Bob Brash, our teacher, would read our work with us and sometimes zip out parts of our sentences, with a sound effect, or he would turn a sentence inside out to make it into better writing. He’d shift the order of our paragraphs, too. Instant improvements. I learned a ton just from his modeling, and we all worked together to figure out how to produce a newspaper using mostly the old Wordperfect word processor and a bit of tape and some old-school lightboxes. Composing with words, but also composing pages, and for people to see and read and like and share, all non-virtually.
The local small-town radio station let us do a high school news show, and I and my friends would get together and try to be funny and deliver the high school news. We sometimes got in trouble, because it turns out you’re not supposed to be as bold as your favorite sketch comedy heroes when you’re broadcasting as high school kids on the local station. And also you’re not that funny, really—not yet. You’re trying, but the station manager is going to assure you that you’re not really qualified for comedy, and he’ll have a point. And yet: We went from watching Saturday Night Live to imitating it, trying out our own just-okay jokes on the radio and in the newspaper and sometimes on stages, too. We learned to upstage and vamp and take stage tumbles during summer theatre weeks. You have to turn your shoulder just so, if you want to fall like Chevy Chase, and even then it’s risky. You’ve got to be in tune with your acting partners if you want to be as funny as Bill Murray. You write, you read, you absorb, you repeat, you refine. You take it to an audience, and you try again.
And all of this takes me back to that neighborhood they built, beyond the sidewalk, when I was a kid. Who said they could use what they had to make a whole new place? I mean: There’s a real answer to that, about zoning ordinances and building codes, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. Eventually you learn that people shape things and make things, and that you can be part of it. Like, one day in the band room, this kid played the keyboard part from Van Halen’s song “Jump,” which is a great song. And this other kid sat down at the drums and played along, and this song was happening in front of me. Just happening. I thought, “You can just do that. I want to do that.” So I tried, and some of the results were kind of awesome. You can make your own jokes and newspapers and radio shows and bands, and its can be pretty bad at first, and you can get better at it.
So when Professor Moe asked me to talk about how I learned to write, I also thought about how I learned to play drums, how we would put together little bands and see what we could do, how we tried to make zines and coffeehouse performances and midnight readings in abandoned barns. (Don’t ask.)
Okay. So after all that I think we actually have three parts: The sounds and the meanings and the meetings with audiences, and those meetings will transform the whole thing again. Because our writing is meant to go out in the world and do things. It’s words, and words are the oldest magic on Earth. There was a frog, and he built a neighborhood using a switchblade and some sass and superior mastery of the building codes and local conventions. And a merry tune.
You’re here because your college writing is good, and some of that writing is part of how you’re going pro in your field. You know you can do some stuff with words. But you’re also learning that if you watch other people do stuff with words, then you can learn to do even more stuff with words, and that’s how you get both new ideas and new neighborhoods, both poems and patents. The learning part never actually ends. So the joke is on Professor Moe, who asked me to tell you how I learned to write: I still don’t know how to write. But I do keep getting better at writing because I keep falling in love with the sounds and meanings all around me. The advice part of this talk is just this: You should do that, too. You’ve made a nice start. Keep going.
Whitworth University
May 2025