N. Scott Momaday…
Many professors influenced me in various ways as a student; among them: James Hartle, the young physicist who later often worked with Stephen Hawking; the old Jesuit priest who taught Latin American history (I forget his name—like Mr. Biden, this old author can forget a few things, but this priest didn’t avoid the scandals or fail to mention the many leaders who fathered so many illegitimate childdren—and he became the model for Bastiann van Coevorden’s priest involved in that Interpol agent’s marriage to Esther Brookstone, the art detective); and N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa Native American who taught me to love poetry.
Dr. Momaday is probably best known for House Made of Dawn, his Pulitzer-prize winning novel describing the life of a young Native American who returns to the reservation from the war with what we’d now call PTSD. But he also left us with many poems, short stories, and essays.
I can still see him pacing up there on the stage, book in hand and reading classic poetry in that expressive baritone voice (perhaps you saw him in that PBS special a few years ago?), while I struggled to decipher the content and emotion contained in those journeys through English poetry with this marvelous time-travel guide. As a first-semester freshman, college was new to me, but I needn’t have worried. The lectures took place in a large lecture class with over one-hundred students, so the professor had his group of TAs. Maybe some of them approached Momaday’s competence, but mine didn’t. (I took the experience gained in those first large lecture courses into account when I introduced them in South America, but that’s another tale.) I was still able to ace that first college English course because all I had to do was include a mention of Freud somewhere in the quizzes and reports; the TA loved “Freudian interpretations” and rewarded them in his grading!
Of course, the other thing Professor Momaday taught me was that I am not a poet! While I’ve published a few pathetic attempts (I’m partial to “Ode to St. John” by Esther Brookstone in Son of Thunder and “A Goodbye” by Penelope Castro in Menace from Moscow), I’ve compensated for my lack of skills in writing poetry by creating a few novels instead.
N. Scott Momaday was awarded the Pulitzer after I had him as an English professor. I feel that my experience as his student, though, could beat any obtained in an MFA course. I read House Made of Dawn after that college English course. Only critics can determine how much that influenced my own writing, but Professor Momaday is certainly someone whom I’ll always fondly remember.
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The Collector. This fifth book in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series is special in several ways: Related to the above, the reader might have fun with Rolando Castilblanco’s poem “On Modern Art.” (I originally wrote it for my father, who became a full-time artist in his later years, specializing in landscapes but often expressing sentiments similar to those in the poem.) It also introduces Esther Brookstone for the first time. My two NYPD detectives go after a criminal organization that uses stolen artwork to finance other nefarious activities, something akin to a prequel to Rembrandt’s Angel, and also dealing with real stolen artwork, in this case from Boston’s Stuart Gardner museum. This novel stands alone, though, and can be found everywhere quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon!).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
