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STEVEN JOHN: With news from Minnesota Public Radio, good morning. I'm Steven John. The Minnesota Department of Transportation says rush hour drivers can expect continued uncertainty in the ramp meter shut off. MnDOT says, one preliminary finding of the study is that drivers are leaving home and work earlier, extending the rush hour. The evening rush, which typically starts at 3:00 PM, has been starting at around 2:30. Drivers and observers reported more delays on day two of the shutdown, but there were fewer accidents than usual. There were about 30 crashes yesterday, which normally-- when normally there are about between 40 and 50.

Three major candidates for the US Senate face off in a televised debate tonight. Republican incumbent Rod Grams, Democratic challenger Mark Dayton and James Gibson of the Independence Party will take part in the hour-long debate, which will also be broadcast live on Minnesota Public Radio.

Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan is in the Twin Cities today to hold what he calls a town hall meeting at the University of Minnesota. Buchanan says he's disappointed the national media has effectively imposed a blackout on his campaign. He says, if he had been allowed to debate Al Gore and George W. Bush, his campaign would have caught on.

PAT BUCHANAN: I think the American people should hear more ideas expressed and hear more candidates and get a much broader range of choices for the future of their country.

STEVEN JOHN: Buchanan says the US should be more critical of Israel, which he says has to take its share of the blame for the recent upsurge in violence in the Middle East. Video Update may close up to a fifth of its stores as part of a bankruptcy reorganization. Company chief executive Dan Potter says only two or three of the stores affected are in the Twin Cities area and none are in outstate Minnesota.

Partly to mostly sunny, a mild day across the state today. Highs around 60 in the Northeast to the low 70s in the extreme South. For the Twin Cities, right around 68 this afternoon. It's 48 now in Minneapolis, Saint Paul. Bemidji has 36 fog and 39 in Saint Cloud, and 43 in Mankato. That's a news update. I'm Steven John.

SPEAKER 1: Today's programming is supported by 3M, which generously matches more than 900 employee contributions to MPR.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

KATHERINE LANPHER: Good morning. Welcome to Midmorning. I'm Katherine Lanpher. Poet Mark Doty has called his latest memoir a sissy boy's story. It's the story of a childhood spent moving from town to town, observing the drift and isolation of his family and grappling with his sexuality, he's taught is wrong. It's also a glorious story about survival. Art saved his life, Doty writes. And how he comes to find what's beautiful and what's life affirming, not only saved the boy, but helped to make the poet.

He's the author of five poetry collections. His awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His previous memoir, Heaven's Coast, was about his grief at the death of his long time partner from AIDS. We'll talk to him today about his most current book, the memoir titled Firebird. He joins us in the studio. Thanks for coming by.

MARK DOTY: My pleasure, Katherine.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Now, you've already written one memoir. What inspired this one?

MARK DOTY: I missed the first one when I was finished. As a poet, I'm used to starting and stopping, writing smaller units. And I discovered in writing Heaven's Coast that I loved dwelling in a more extended narrative. Every morning, I could come back to my desk, pick up where I left off, and continue. And poets never have that luxury.

KATHERINE LANPHER: What story did you want to tell in this one?

MARK DOTY: I wanted to return to stories about my childhood, stories I tried to render in verse many years ago, never successfully. I wanted to think about what it was that made art the world of what people made such a refuge for me as a child. I was an army brat. We moved all the time. I was overweight. I wore glasses. I loved to read. I had a Southern accent in places where often no one else did.

And so I was almost guaranteed to be on the margins of any group in which I found myself. But I learned very early on that the world of books, the world of music, of the visual arts, was always open to me. When I had no human community, I could find a community in the world of art.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Now, so many people have focused on this book as a portrait of a young gay man, but you've said it's about an aesthetic education. Why don't you extrapolate on that? Is that what you're talking about right here?

MARK DOTY: That's exactly what I'm talking about. I think that kids who experience themselves as different, as exiles in some way, are always looking for a way to belong, a way to connect to something outside ourselves, which represents the richness, the beauty that we feel inside. Like so many children, I could feel the power and allure of my inner life, but I don't think anybody could look at me and see that because I was the stranger. I was the boy who wasn't good at sports. I was the kid who didn't know how to belong.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Now, of course, doesn't every teenager feel like that?

MARK DOTY: I think every child feels like that. And that's one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book. I think that all of us experience ourselves as outsiders at some time or another. We're on the margin in some way. And I was curious about what is it that helps us to feel affirmed, to feel whole in ourselves, even though we know we're on that edge? How do we connect when we don't connect?

KATHERINE LANPHER: You have said childhood's work is to see what lies beneath. Woof. And here, I thought it was learning how to spell and maybe playing with tinker toys. What do you mean by that?

MARK DOTY: I mean learning to read the environment around you, trying to figure out who are these people who brought me into the world? Why do they live as they do? What is it that they expect from me? What is it that they want for themselves? It seems to me that so much goes unspoken in childhood and children are always trying to read the signals, figure things out, know who they're supposed to be in the world, what their possibilities are.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Talk about the title. Why is this book called Firebird?

MARK DOTY: I had a wonderful fourth grade teacher, a woman who changed my life. Her name was Miss Virginia Times, and she was my teacher in Tucson, Arizona in about 1961 or so. And Miss Times cared more about her students creativity than anything else. She communicated to us that what we might draw from our own imaginations, from our own interior lives, was simply the most important thing to her.

When our class was taking a field trip to the Symphony for a concert, she played records for us of all the music that we would hear. One of those pieces of music was the suite from Stravinsky's Firebird, and she would ask us to push all the desks in our classroom back against the wall. We would stand in the middle of the room with our eyes closed, and she'd crank up the volume on the phonograph and she'd say, "Now children, move." And I loved this.

I felt for the first time that I could absolutely lose my little life by immersing myself in something larger in the life of that music. I could join my limited self to a community that was extended in time and in space. I could be part-- I could put myself in Stravinsky's hands, as it were. And that was both a way of losing myself and, paradoxically, of finding myself at once.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Could you read a small section from the book, Firebird?

MARK DOTY: Sure. This is a description of that moment when my class began to dance.

Another day. It is time to experience the music in another way. With all of our bodies, all the desks in the classroom are pushed to the perimeter, creating an open space in the center in which we all stand. Miss Times tells us the story of the Firebird, how that Phoenix immolates itself and dances in the flames and then rises up again, radiant and new and the veils of its own ashes.

We are to close our eyes and then the music will begin. When we are ready, when we feel the music within us, then we may begin to move. We wait in our self-made dark crackle at the beginning of the record, then silence, and then the Firebird's opening strains. Something approaching, like whether. We're still at first, but then a few kids begin to sway, and then to rock.

And soon we are stepping and turning, turning every which way in a freedom of motion, which, in truth, I myself have instigated because I am suddenly deeply at home in the music, which seems to inhabit me. And as the piece mounts in intensity, so does my movement, the fluidity of my arms and their ripples and archings, the bowing of my legs, the bending of my spine. At first, I must be careful not to bump into them, but soon they become invisible to me, the other children.

There isn't any classroom around me anymore. The music is effortless grace and subsumed by it. I also am effortless, something written quickly in the air. I'm utterly transported and free. Haven't I always been fire and never known it? Miss Times is, I think, flabbergasted, or at least I imagine so now. Who is this boy who pirouettes in his husky boy jeans as if he hadn't a shred of shame?

At the time, it seemed to me so matter of fact. Who wouldn't give themselves over to such an outpouring? Who wouldn't let that music come welling up as if it came, not out of our portable phonograph, but from the depths of the body? That is what has fallen away, like the Firebird's scorched veil, my shame. How could I even know I carried it until I laid it down?

KATHERINE LANPHER: Thank you. You have written that you were educated between two poles. What were they?

MARK DOTY: Well, that Firebird dance is one of them. That was an early experience, which said to me, look who you could be. Look how limitless the possibilities of being alive are. Look at the unknown riches which lie within you. The other pole was a far less encouraging one. I came from a small and troubled family, a family marred by alcoholism.

During my teenage years, my parents had a particularly difficult time with accepting who their children turned out to be. My sister's behavior was troubling to them. Their perception of my incipient homosexuality was troubling to them. And when I was 16, there was a kind of act of violence in my family. My mother, in a drunken state, pulled a gun on me one day. And that seems to me the opposing pole of the Firebird dance.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Why did she pull a gun on you?

MARK DOTY: Well, she had found a book. She had found a-- I had discovered a book about sex, a book that I had read and tried to hide away. And when my mother discovered that in my room, I think it confirmed her worst fears. Her son was a gay boy. And something in her at that point was terrified of that, could not accept it. Her response was that perhaps that child shouldn't live. So you can see how the message, this child doesn't deserve to live, stands in absolute opposition to the promise that that early experience of art held out.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I also see how you were still her child somehow because when you were talking up to this revelation in our conversation, you said, kind of an act of violence. Mark Doty, pulling a gun on someone is an act of violence.

MARK DOTY: Yes, well, you're absolutely right, Katherine.

KATHERINE LANPHER: This is Interesting how that happens, how we do that.

MARK DOTY: I think I hedge a little bit in saying kind of because I so much wanted to write a book which is not another narrative of a dysfunctional family. I think we've all heard stories about how kids are marred.

KATHERINE LANPHER: When are you on Oprah? Let me look.

MARK DOTY: Yeah, right. That narrative, for very good reasons, it's been part of American culture over the last 15 to 20 years. We've been trying to take apart our monolithic sense of what a family is, trying to understand it differently. I think that's a very good thing, but the culture didn't need me to write another of those books. I wanted to talk instead about how creativity becomes a refuge. Of course, if I'm going to talk about why I need a refuge-- if I'm going to talk about needing a refuge, I have to talk about why I need that refuge.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Yeah, this book strikes me. When you're talking about needing a refuge, that's so universal. And yet it's also, this book is often portrayed as the story of a young gay man. How do you deal with the tension of affirming gay identity and yet wanting the book to be taken in all of its fullness?

MARK DOTY: Well, this is a kind of paradox that is essential to any literature, really. The more personal we are, the closer we are to the nature of individual experience, the more readers will be able to connect across the lines of difference. So I discovered this profoundly in publishing Heaven's Coast, a book about grief. I wrote about my partner of a dozen years dying of AIDS. But people came to that book and saw their experience mirrored, whether it was the loss of a partner or the disappearance of a parent into the fog of Alzheimer's, or the end of a relationship.

One man even wrote me a letter describing how he had lost his homeland. His country no longer existed. He could not return home. And he saw his grief for that place of origin mirrored in my book. I could never have imagined that. And that's the gift of what literature can do. We hope, be personal enough that it allows the reader to connect.

Well, I want, in Firebird, to speak to other gay boys, to lesbian girls, to people who experience themselves as exemplars of sexual difference. But I also want to speak to everybody who ever felt on the edge in some way, everybody who wasn't who they were supposed to be. And isn't that all of us?

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're talking to poet Mark Doty about his latest memoir. It's called Firebird. We'd like to have you join this conversation. It's 1-800-242-2828. 1-800-242-2828. Mark Doty's other memoir is called Heaven's Coast. He teaches at the University of Fiction. Excuse me, the University of Houston. Paging Dr. Freud. I wonder where that came from. Yeah, you like that?

It's 1-800-242-2828. In the Twin cities, it's 651-227-6000. 651-227-6000. I thought there was-- you make a point in your memoir that I hadn't thought about for a long time, but it was true. You write about a time when a haircut could be a very rebellious act. Could you talk about your sister's haircut and your haircut, and the time difference they showed?

MARK DOTY: Sure, haircuts become occasions of great trauma in this story. In about 1959 when I was a first grader, my sister got the haircut known as a DA. I don't know if we can say what that stands for.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I think we can. I think we can.

MARK DOTY: It stands for duck's ass, more politely known as duck tail. That was a gesture against femininity, against conformity, against being a good girl. It was the point when my sister said, well, the rainbow girls aren't really going to be the path of my future. And suddenly, she had a boyfriend with a motorcycle and a black leather jacket instead. I, 10 years younger, was very impressed by these events.

My parents were impressed too, but in an extremely negative way. That wasn't who they wanted their daughter to be. They saw a future of trouble and dissipation ahead. I couldn't have known that that also predicted my own future with hair. In about 1967 or '68, I started to find a new identity as a teenager through not cutting my hair. I had that kid who had felt like a sissy, a brain, a four eyes suddenly found that he could be sort of cool.

And then he could become downright hip by wearing a Paisley Dashiki wire-rimmed glasses and not cutting his hair anymore. My parents found that hard to accept. And when in fact, I insisted on a regulation crew cut, my response to it was a very grave one. I was, I guess 15 at the time, 14, 15. And I tried to kill myself, not very effective, with a bottle of Sominex.

And it was many years, of course, before I understood that it wasn't the haircut that made me want to die. It was that I had found some little way to feel OK, to feel like an acceptable person and part of the social world of my high school. And to lose that meant, there I was, the kid who could never belong.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Could you talk about the difference between perspective and forgiveness?

MARK DOTY: Absolutely one of the things that the memoir requires of us is attempting to stand back from the stuff of a life in order to see it. The memoirist must treat everybody in his or her life as a character, even the people who you feel angry at, the people who wronged you. And a novelist cannot hate his characters. We have to try to understand those people three dimensionally, to have some connection empathically. Otherwise, the reader won't believe in them.

I found it very helpful to treat my family as my characters so that I had to try to see why they might have behaved as they did? What kinds of forces were shaping them? So to my mind, that is perspective. Forgiveness is another matter. And there's something a little arrogant, finally, about the notion of forgiveness.

Who am I to say, now it's up to me to forgive my mother or to forgive my father for their behavior? It seems more important that I try to find a position of relation to it, a position of understanding. And I think that that's the gift of perspective.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Can you own forgiveness? Can you-- there are those who would argue that you would need to forgive, for instance, your mother, now deceased, for wanting to shoot you so that you can go on. What do you do with that argument?

MARK DOTY: I'm uneasy with the notion because I think that it's important that we honor our anger. I think that it's important that we pay attention to the ways in which we have been violated and that the dark parts of my childhood have very much made me who I am, as well as the bright parts, as well as dancing to that Stravinsky. If I can't hold both within me, then I think I'm a partial person. So I'm a little uncomfortable with the notion that I say, it's all right. I accept the past.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're going to go to Medora in Saint Paul. Medora, welcome to Midmorning.

MEDORA: Hi.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Hi.

MEDORA: I guess I have a question and also a comment. I wanted to comment and just say how-- reiterate how vital it is that schools continue to have our programs and music programs because I know oftentimes the downfall of teachers, especially in our own state, that we are losing those programs in our schools. And I also-- I guess my question one, I wanted to ask, how do you, in our world today, tell people to older, I guess maybe of the older generation parents, how to deal with and how to begin coping with and accepting gay children?

MARK DOTY: Wonderful question. Well, first of all, I couldn't agree with you more about the necessity for arts programs. The opportunity to educate the spirit is too good a one to pass up. And in fact, children who have rich experiences in the visual arts, in music, in sculpture, in all the ways in which people express themselves, are also better equipped to work in more academic fields as well. We know that through creativity, many, many cognitive skills are also strengthened.

As far as to help parents accept their children, well, one thing that we can do is look to our expectations about gender. It seems to me that much of what created a struggle for me as a young gay boy was the difficulty of being a boy in the right way, not knowing the rules, not being able to figure out the rules.

And one of the things that's happened wonderfully since the early '60s when I was struggling to figure out how to play kickball is that I think our culture has loosened up marvelously. We have recognized that gender identity is a continuum, that there are all kinds of appropriate ways to be a little girl or to be a little boy. And I think that we can treasure difference. We can look for ways to allow children to be at home in their own preferences and desires.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Do you ever think if I had been born even 10 years later?

MARK DOTY: Do I ever? I see my own students, often undergraduates or young graduate students, who are so much more self-aware than I could have been at their age. And of course, I can't help but think how much time I wasted in not being able to know myself, not having that kind of access to my feelings that those kids have had. I'm very grateful to be able to be visible as a gay teacher, as a gay writer in those students' lives. It would made a huge difference for me to have people around like that.

KATHERINE LANPHER: You said in an interview once that you tried to write this memoir in your-- or that you couldn't have written this memoir when you were 25, and you mentioned that you tried to do these stories in verse. What do you think stopped you from telling these stories before?

MARK DOTY: Well, part of it it's that matter of perspective. When I began Firebird, I was in my 40s, early 40s, and I was just about the age that my father was when I was a little boy. And as we move through experience, hopefully we develop in some ways. And I think one of those developments is to be able to empathize with older people in a way that when we're young ourselves is very difficult to do.

My parents seem to me like gigantic shadows projected on the bedroom wall, inscrutable. Who could understand these people and why they did what they did? As I myself come closer to their age, I think it gets a little easier to empathize and to connect with their fears and their doubts. That's one of the things that I mean by perspective.

I also think that this story is not just about me and the little boy that I was. This has to do with forces in American life, with my parents moving from little connected towns in East Tennessee where they knew everybody into the great suburban post-war diaspora, where they moved many, many times into communities where they knew no one.

And they were trying to figure out, how do we make a life here? Who are we now? Who should our children be and how can we help them be those people that we imagine? That's obviously not just my story, but a generational story. So memoir, to my mind, is a kind of personal form of history. It's a way that we meet the subjective side of history.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're talking to poet Mark Doty about his new memoir, Firebird. Maybe you're of that generation he was just mentioning. Maybe you too had that childhood of disconnection and travel. We're also talking about what it was like in the '60s to grow up young and gay or lesbian and what the culture was like? How has that culture shifted? We'd like to have you join this conversation. It's 1-800-242-2828. 1-800-242-2828.

Now, this book is not only a story of a young boy. It's also a story of survival. Mark Doty has said that art saved his life. What do we mean by that? We'd like to hear your version. It's 651-227-6000. 651-227-6000. I'm Katherine Lanpher. You're listening to Midmorning. We're going to turn now to Steven John. He's standing by with the latest from the Minnesota Public Radio newsroom.

STEVEN JOHN: Thank you, Katherine. Instant polls from last night's third and final presidential debate suggest watchers were nearly evenly split on which candidate outdid the other. A CBS News poll gives Al Gore a 45% approval rating to George W. Bush's 40% Other polls show them even.

There's word in Israel that the country's security forces have arrested eight Palestinians suspected of involvement in last week's killing of two Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. The report comes on Israel radio. It says the people arrested include a Palestinian man who was photographed at a window after the killing with blood on his hands.

President Clinton has been meeting with injured sailors from the USS Cole this morning in Norfolk, Virginia. He's there to attend a Memorial service for the 17 who died in an apparent terrorist attack on the US destroyer last week in Yemen.

For the first time in seven months, the Dow is below the 10,000 mark as investors respond to concerns about corporate earnings and inflation. In the opening minutes of trading, the blue chip index fell more than 430 points before regaining some ground. Broader indicators are also down.

Buses are rolling again on the streets of Los Angeles, following the end of a month-old transit strike. Subway service is expected to get back on track tomorrow.

The Minnesota prison system intends to cut 186 jobs through attrition as part of a plan to reduce per prisoner costs, which are among the highest in the nation. The Department of Corrections predicts the prison population will increase between 200 and 300 inmates per year.

Prosecutors say they will seek a four-year sentence today for the man who pleaded guilty to causing the accident that killed Timberwolves player Malik Sealy. Souksangouane Phengsene pleaded guilty last month to criminal vehicular homicide.

A partly to mostly sunny, mild day across the region today. Highs should range from around 60 in the Arrowhead to the low 70s. In the extreme South for the Twin Cities, upper 60s expected with light northwesterly winds. Bemidji has 48 this hour. It's 40 in Brainerd. Rochester has 52, and it's 52 degrees in the Twin Cities. That's the news update. I'm Steven John.

SPEAKER 2: Minnesota Public Radio is looking for volunteers to help us answer phones during our next membership drive. Do you have a few hours between November 9 and the 17? Of course, you do. So call us today and sign up. We'll give you parking, food, and a good time. It's a great chance to talk to listeners on the phone. You get to meet other members and also staff here at MPR. To volunteer, call 1-800-228-7123 right now. And thanks. Today's programming is sponsored in part by Brian Brown and Kelly Davis Brown in celebration of their wedding anniversary.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I'm Katherine Lanpher. You're listening to Midmorning. We're continuing our conversation with poet Mark Doty. He is the author of both Firebird and Heaven's Coast, both memoirs. We're talking to him about his latest, which is Firebird. We'd like to have you join this conversation. 1-800-242-2828. 1-800-242-2828. In the Twin Cities, it's 651-227-6000. 651-227-6000.

Now before we go to those calls, Mark Doty, I wanted to talk-- there are some listeners who I think even if they haven't read your poetry, they've heard about you because of a fracas at the University of St. Thomas a year or so ago. Your memoir about your partner's death, Heaven's Coast, was selected as the common book at the University of St. Thomas. And there was some-- which meant that the entire class, as I recall, the entire freshman class, had to read it. And there was some consternation over that. Talk for a minute about what happened with that discussion.

MARK DOTY: Sure. I actually thought that those teachers were remarkably brave to use the book, which is about my grief at the illness and death of my partner as a common text for 1,100 freshmen in a Catholic University in the Midwest. I was surprised by that. And I guess it's not surprising that they received some flak from conservative members of the faculty and people in the community, potential donors and trustees who wanted to know, well, why is this book that we could describe as a love story between two gay men being taught in our school? I went to St. Thomas to read from the book last year.

KATHERINE LANPHER: What was that like?

MARK DOTY: Well, I walked into an auditorium with 1,200 kids in it, all of whom had read my memoir, a very peculiar experience because was they knew me far, far better than I knew any of them. As I walked down the aisle, I felt I was wearing a big scaffolding of light bulbs, which read homosexual over my head. I'm not used to coming to schools as a visiting gay man. I'm used to appearing as a visiting writer. So it was odd for me to have my difference foregrounded in that way.

However, I talked to the students about the difference between art and activism, how activism asks us to change our mind and to take action, therefore, and how art instead asks us to have an experience, an emotional and intellectual experience in response to what someone else has made. And that's what I was asking them to do, to meet me as an artist. And they were remarkably willing to do so.

I talked to them about the writing of Heaven's Coast. I read to them from Firebird. We took questions. And about two hours later, there was such a feeling of warmth and community in that auditorium. It was truly remarkable and affirmative for me.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're going to go to Liz in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Liz, welcome to Midmorning.

LIZ: Thank you for taking my call, Katherine. It's a pleasure to speak with you, Mark.

MARK DOTY: Good morning.

LIZ: I'm an admirer of your writing.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Thank you.

LIZ: One of the things I wanted to ask you was, do you remember the poem you read on the program with Bill Moyers about going to the church?

MARK DOTY: Yes, about the performance of Handel's Messiah?

LIZ: That one. Yes. And I was wondering if you could please tell me which collection of yours that is in so I could have that at hand.

MARK DOTY: Sure thing. That is in Sweet Machine, which is my most recent book of poems, and it was published by Harper Collins in 1998. The poem is called Messiah, Christmas Portions.

KATHERINE LANPHER: You know, I was going to ask you to read a poem for those people who haven't heard you or who haven't read your poems. Could you read us? I have my favorite there in front of you.

MARK DOTY: Sure, I will. This is a poem which began in the Stop & Shop, my favorite grocery store in Orleans, Massachusetts, near the town where I live most of the time. This is called, A Display Of Mackerel.

They lie in parallel rows on ice, head to tail. Each a foot of luminosity barred with black bands, which divide the scales radiant sections like seams of lead in a Tiffany window, iridescent, watery, prismatics. Think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soap bubble sphere.

Think sun on gasoline, splendor and splendor, and not a one in any way distinguished from the other. Nothing about them of individuality. Instead, they're all exact expressions of the one soul, each a perfect fulfillment of heaven's template. Mackerel essence.

As if after a lifetime arriving at this enameling, the jewelers made uncountable examples, each as intricate in its oily fabulation as the one before. Suppose we could iridesce like these and lose ourselves entirely in the universe of shimmer. Would you want to be yourself only, unduplicatable, doomed to be lost?

They'd prefer plainly to be flashing participants, multitudinous. Even now, they seem to be bolting forward, heedless of stasis. They don't care they're dead and nearly frozen, just as presumably they didn't care that they were living all, all for all the rainbowed school and its acres of brilliant classrooms in which no verb is singular or everyone is. How happy they seem. Even on ice, to be together, selfless, which is the price of gleaming.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Thank you.

MARK DOTY: My pleasure.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're going to go to Abigail in Minneapolis. Welcome to Midmorning.

ABIGAIL: Hi, Mr. Doty.

MARK DOTY: Good morning.

ABIGAIL: I wanted to take a step back and talk about Heaven's Coast. I had heard a lot about it, and I thought it only appropriate that I buy my copy when I'm in Provincetown. So I went to Recovering Hearts Bookstore and got the last copy on the shelf. And you had mentioned that it spoke to a lot of people who are grieving in different ways. And the reason why it was recommended to me was because of the friends that I have who have lost fathers to AIDS or have lost-- or whether or not they lost their fathers were part of a community. So the grieving was, for many of us that grew up with gay parents, it was grieving about the loss of a community.

MARK DOTY: That's so interesting. Yeah.

ABIGAIL: So this brought words to our experience when we were experiencing this as much younger people from that perspective as children.

MARK DOTY: How old are you, if I may ask?

ABIGAIL: I'm 28.

MARK DOTY: So this is so intriguing to me because, of course, I experienced the epidemic from a different perspective. So to speak to your community, those kids who I think whose experience might be less represented, is thrilling to me. And I'm grateful that you could find your experience reflected there.

ABIGAIL: Yeah, I actually have not lost my father, but really losing the sense of community that we had growing up and many of my friends who did lose their parents. So that's why it was recommended to me. And as I said, we lack the ability to find those words. And so when you express that, it brings-- it validates our experience of the grieving.

And then I wanted to ask you a question. Rebecca Wells, who was in town recently, named you among her favorite authors. And I wanted to know where you seek your inspiration?

MARK DOTY: Goodness. Everywhere. In poetry, I return again and again to some perennial favorites, most of them who aren't living: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Keith's, the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In memoir, it's actually mostly my contemporaries whose work thrills me: Terry Tempest Williams, Frank Conroy, Mary Karr, who I know is just in the Twin Cities. Jo Ann Beards, Jill Cement, Bernard Cooper. Many, many people who are, I think, writing wonderful and brave new, work in which they're seeking ways to represent the story of a life inventively.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Let's go to Mike in Saint Paul. Welcome to Midmorning.

MIKE: Hello.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Hi.

MIKE: Thanks for taking my call. I am stepping back a little bit. I turned down the radio when you were describing the dance, Mark, and I just found that really touching and brought to mind for me, one of my issues, which has been actually being heterosexual and having an artistic nature.

MARK DOTY: Yes, right. People think that's a little odd, huh?

MIKE: It's interesting that one of my roommates in college, for instance, was gay and an artist. And I've known a number of people who have been artists in one way or another and have been gay. And for some reason, it almost seemed more straightforward for them to take an identity. And I don't know that I've ever found an identity as an artist, being a musician. It's almost more acceptable to say I'm homosexual and, therefore, I can be flamboyant and emotional and whatever.

MARK DOTY: Sure, you raise a really crucial point, which is that homophobia doesn't just wind up oppressing gay people. The notion that to be a man is to behave in certain ways, to be a woman is to behave in certain ways, limits us all. It, as you point out, restricts our possibilities.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Let's go to David in Saint Paul. David, welcome to Midmorning.

DAVID: Hello, Katherine.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Hi.

DAVID: Hello, Mark.

MARK DOTY: Good morning.

DAVID: Mark, I think it's exceptional that while your craft is extraordinary, really the message that you share is so vital and so important. I find that your openness and your sharing, people of-- and you and I are in the same generation, really, I think, is making the world a very different place--

MARK DOTY: Well, thank you.

DAVID: --than it was for us 20 years ago. At a National Coming Out Day luncheon a couple of years ago, a speaker suggested that we have a moral obligation to be as out and to be as visible and as honest about who we are as we possibly can be, because we owe all of the people who preceded us, who've made our lives easier and better, we owe them that respect in taking full advantage of the opportunities that they've made for us. And certainly, that's something that you're doing and doing very eloquently.

MARK DOTY: Well, I appreciate that. I find so often I am-- I visit schools at all levels. I'll walk into, say, a high school auditorium and I can sense kids being a little nervous. I mean, who is this guy? Is he going to be straight forward with us or not? And the more open that I am, the more I'm willing to stand in the center of my life and say, here I am. Like it or not, you can deal with me. The more people meet me. And it's really quite remarkable. And it calls upon one to live with some degree of courage. It's not like coming out as something that you do once and you're done. It seems to be a fact, a kind of daily activity.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I think that's a very interesting point. I think most people think, OK, you break it to the folks and then, whee, you're free.

MARK DOTY: Exactly. Not quite. What about the taxi driver who asked you about the Mrs. or the salesman who is asking you about your Christmas shopping or-- I think this just goes on and on and on in all our daily lives because our expectations, the normalizing narrative, that we all live with, this is the way people are, this is who you're supposed to be. And we all find ourselves resisting that.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I want to go back to one of our previous callers because he was saying it was almost easier for his gay roommate to be artistic than it was for him. Do you ever find that as we have more recognition of gay and lesbian pride as we have the parades, do you ever find that there's a sort of straight envy?

MARK DOTY: I find that, of course, there's an envy of the notion that-- it's kind of an illusory notion, actually, that identity could be simple. You could claim who you are once and for all and have it over with. You won't have to struggle anymore. Well, the news is, this is not the case. And this is the problem with gay pride and the rainbow flag and that whole, frankly, kind of commercial set of characteristics, which argues that, here's what identity is. And, in fact, human beings are always a whole lot more complicated than that. None of us can be homogenized so simply.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're talking to poet Mark Doty about his latest memoir. It's called Firebird. We have some open phone lines. Go ahead and join this conversation. We're talking about how art saved his life. How did art save your life? How much better is it or how different is it for young gay and lesbian students, gay and lesbian 10-year-old, for instance, how is life different for them than it was 20 years ago? What have you noted in your own life?

We're also talking about the forms of literature here. Poetry versus memoir. What has memoir-- how has it served you? Are you one of those people who reads memoir all the time, or are you a lover of poetry? As one of our previous callers noted, Mark Doty was on the recent Bill Moyers special. Of course, we also would like to point out Mark Doty is the author of five poetry collections, and his awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award. It's 1-800-242-2828. In the Twin cities, it's 651-227-6000 651-227-6000.

I wanted to talk to you for a minute about, after you wrote your first memoir, Heaven's Coast, you said in an interview that you went through a period where you felt like you had used up your memory, your personal narrative for stories and had given it away. What's it like when-- do you feel like you're giving away yourself when you write these memoirs?

MARK DOTY: Well, in that case, I had written a book, which was written with very little distance. It was written right after the fact of Wally's death. And I wanted to write a book with no distance because I thought there was plenty to read about grief from a psychological point of view that said, your feelings are normal, or from a spiritual point of view, which said, death isn't really the end of life. But I couldn't find things to read which were written from the terrible heat of new grief, where one doesn't want to be consoled, one wants to live in the terrifying flux.

So I wrote a book that did that, but that meant that I had put all of myself onto the page. And suddenly when the book came out, I had this awful feeling that I couldn't remember anything about my life with Wally except what was in the book. I thought, I've replaced my life with a book, which just frightened me. And then on the book tour, about two weeks into it, I remembered something I'd forgotten to include in the book. And I was so grateful because it meant that my life was larger than my book.

And this is so crucial in understanding about memoir. We're always telling a story in one way for a particular purpose. Firebird tells the story of my growing up in order to investigate this question about aesthetic education, about finding a community in the world of art. But I could have told this story in other ways too and it would become a very different book. I think that our memories are always shifting. We're never quite finished with the past. We simply walk around the past and we look at it from a different point of view.

KATHERINE LANPHER: How has your family reacted to this memoir?

MARK DOTY: Wildly divergently. My sister whose response I was very nervous about because the book talks about her wild teenage years and my sister is now a grandmother, and I didn't know what she'd told her children and her grandchildren about her early life. And I thought, I don't want them to find out about their mother and grandmother's life from reading it in my book. So I gave the book to her before it was published. I waited with bated breath for the phone to ring, and then she called and said, I want to tell you, your book is so funny and so tender.

She said, it's like looking in a mirror of things that happened 40 years ago. But she said, it's a kind mirror and a gentle one, and you were nicer to people than I would have been, which, of course, made me feel so much better. Then she gave the book to her kids to read. She said, I want them to know about my story and your story. She said, this really is your story and not mine. She said, the things that you got wrong just made this book that much more you.

And I think that's the best response a memoirist could hope for from your family, because, of course, you're not telling their story. You can only tell your own story because that's all you can truly know. I'm not even sure you can know that.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Well, I was just going to say, what kind of research did you do?

MARK DOTY: I did no research at all. I wanted to write a book, which was allegiant to memory, to how the facts felt. Not to what happened, but to how that experience formed itself in the mind of that child. And I didn't even do this consciously. When the book was being copy edited, the copy editor raised a question. I had said that my sister was married in a beige dress, and I speculated about why she was wearing a beige dress.

Did she pick it? Did my parents make her wear that dress? And the copy editor said, well, why don't you just ask her? And I realized it had never occurred to me to ask her because it wasn't that kind of book. It was so interested instead in how that child tried to make sense of things.

KATHERINE LANPHER: And your mother is deceased. How did your father respond to that?

MARK DOTY: Well, that that's the other side of the coin. My father simply met the book with silence, a silence which has continued now for over a year. That's been painful to me. And yet at the same time, I have the sense of having replaced a somewhat false congeniality with an honest silence.

I think that it is a generous gesture for children to allow their parents to know them and to see them, even though it may make our parents very uncomfortable. And one of the characteristics of gay and lesbian kids is that we often don't let our parents know us because we're afraid. We're afraid of their judgment. So I think I withheld a great deal of myself from my father and it must have been difficult for him to read the manuscript.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're going to go to Betty in Saint Peter. Welcome to Midmorning.

BETTY: Thank you. Good morning. And I was an activist in the American labor movement for quite a number of years. And I just wanted to respond to the question about how art saved our lives. Music and theater and reading fiction and fictionalized truth really contributed to me keeping my personal sanity as our work became more and more focused on bread and butter issues, the terms of-- the terms and conditions of employment.

How many hours we work, what we get paid, and just the bread and butter issues. So having music and having people sing their passion really kept alive, for me, the nature of a movement in the work that we were doing.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Thank you, Betty.

MARK DOTY: Absolutely. It's one of the ways that we feel the presence of our own spirits and we feel the spirit in other people.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Let's go to Cliff in Rosemont. Welcome to Midmorning.

CLIFF: Hi.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Hi, Cliff.

CLIFF: I'll be honest with you. I'm really sort of concerned and troubled by the discussion in the sense that a medium is being provided for the speaker. And you stated yourself that you referred to 10-year-old gays and lesbians. And I really find it hard to believe that, generally speaking, a person at that age has made that determination about their sexuality. I know I didn't have sexuality myself though I was 17, if you want.

And it's a traditional values. We won't let the Boy Scouts into schools because they're for heterosexuality but we'll let the guest speaker into schools who's sponsoring homosexuality. I'll hang up but--

KATHERINE LANPHER: Cliff, hang on a minute, because here's one thing I'm having problems following. If 10-year-olds don't have any sexuality or sexual orientation, then why should we care who the leaders are?

CLIFF: Well, I'm not saying they don't have sexuality, but I don't think they made the determination. I think the person is pretty confused right through puberty and some of that confusion doesn't necessarily mean they're homosexual. I don't know that-- and I do have a problem with it, is that if, first of all, one, you won't let the Boy Scouts in schools because they support a traditional value, but you let other peoples in schools that are non-traditional that maybe go against other people's traditional values. So it's really skewed.

And the other thing is, if you're taking someone who is confused as to their sexuality at a puberty level, why you're allowing that kind of influence.

KATHERINE LANPHER: All right, Cliff, I thank you for your call and we'll let Mark Doty respond.

MARK DOTY: Sure. Well, I think there's a real difference between desire and identity. Now, I knew very early on, and I talk about this in Firebird, that there was something about men's bodies, which was powerful for me. I remember, and I talk about it in the book, being six years old in first grade and going for a ride on the back of my sister's boyfriend's motorcycle and feeling a kind of excitement and dizziness that I certainly couldn't articulate.

And on one level, that's not sexual because that six-year-old boy was too young for anything to be exactly sexual. But it was something deep within myself, something deeply related to desire. Now, that's a different thing than a homosexual identity, than calling yourself a gay person or a lesbian person. And you're right, that's something that comes along much later. And I would not be inclined to say to a 10-year-old, well, you're a gay child or you're a lesbian child, or you're a straight child because I think that that's irrelevant. I do think that we can give kids permission to have the whole range of feeling of who they are and not worry about judging their identities.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Let's go to Craig in Minneapolis. Craig, welcome to Midmorning.

CRAIG: Thank you.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Yes.

CRAIG: I grew up in Texas in the 1960s and in an environment where gender roles were very, very clearly defined. If you didn't play football or team sports, you lacked character, you were a Communist, all sorts of things, including suspect as a man or as a boy. I guess what saved my life, partly, was I got involved in the drama club, in theater. And part of that was-- a big part of that was it was a place to belong. It was a team effort.

So team sports were very, I saw, very oppressive, but yet I needed to belong to something larger than myself and could belong to that team effort. And ironically, one of the things I learned in that is that I was not going to become a professional theater person, but I carried that experience into my activism work. I chose social work as a career and it certainly is part of my work every day. I just recently returned from Texas, where my nephew recently committed suicide, which has been a very devastating experience for my family.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Craig, I have to scoot you along. I'm so sorry.

CRAIG: OK. Do I need to end right now?

KATHERINE LANPHER: Yeah. Well, no, just if you have a question, quickly.

CRAIG: Yeah. His struggle was about sexuality, whether or not he was going to be gay or not. He was 22, whether or not he was gay or not. But I wish I had known about your works because I think that they could have helped him in whatever his final outcome would have been other than what, in fact, he did choose.

KATHERINE LANPHER: All right.

MARK DOTY: So many gay and lesbian kids in the country still commit suicide. And I think that is, of course, the result of isolation, a sense of being alone in the world. If art could make some difference in that isolation, then that will-- I will have feel I have done quite enough.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Mark Doty, we've run out of time. I want to thank you for joining us today.

MARK DOTY: It's been my pleasure, Katherine. Thank you. And thanks to all the callers.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Mark Doty will be reading at 7:00 PM tonight at the Borders Bookstore in Calhoun Square in Uptown Minneapolis. The book, again, is Firebird. I'm Katherine Lanpher. If you've missed any Midmorning shows for the last week, you know where to go. Minnesotapublicradio.org. Make sure you click the link for Midmorning. You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio.

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SPEAKER 3: On Sound Money this week.