DON MORRILL: I have some papers at home from grade school that show I at least tried to write some stories. I don't recall ever doing that, but apparently I was drawn to do that. I drew, and I did various kinds of artistic things as a kid, but I was not the family artist. My brother was the family artist. I was supposed to be the athlete. So I think I pursued those things quietly and then put them aside.
When I think about the eureka moment, if it's a eureka moment for writing, it actually does involve my brother, the one who is the artistic one, my younger brother. He had a typewriter, a little portable typewriter.
And one day, I just sat down in it. There was no one there. And I put a piece of paper in it. And I just typed out some words. And there was a magic in that for me. I don't recall what the words were. But I knew there was something very powerful that was happening there.
And I think it's about not only creating the words or generating the words, but having them suddenly, in their own way, being monumentalized-- is that the right word-- by being typed. And so I became a secret writer.
And I was a secret writer for a long time, because it wasn't what I was supposed to be. And my brother is not a writer. He's a commercial artist. So he never pursued that. But I did.
And eventually I started writing poems. And I think I started writing poems because I was impressed by song lyrics, and those lyrics that you quote to people, those things that are truths, that are powerful pieces of wisdom, or that's the way it is.
And you quote that. And you want to replicate that. You want to reproduce that. You want to be able to have that magical power. You want to spell, you want to cast spells.
And so I started writing. And then it became play, more and more and more, kind of a private place. And I think it was also a place where I started to create myself. I often wonder what I would have become, if I hadn't become so absorbed in my secret writing life. It took me a long time to tell people that I was actually a poet. It seemed to me a wondrous and amazing thing, something that people do elsewhere, not in suburbs in Des Moines, Iowa.
So that was eureka moment for me. And there have been others. But I think that's the earliest one. And I think it's important that it occurred in solitude. Most of the deep pleasures of writing are in solitude. And most of the life of a writer is in solitude, even though that solitude is very populated with many different things, and you have many different kinds of experiences.
I frequently tell students, everything that you do alone, you bring to every social encounter. All the reading that you do, all the thinking that you do, all the writing that you do, the drawing, whatever it is that you're doing, that make you who you are, all the encounters that you had in that solitude, you will bring to others.
And those who have that kind of relationship with their solitude and what it can bring to them are people who have a certain kind of magnetism in social life that others don't. At least I want to believe that. So eureka.