Several stories and statements by novelists and poets have been a delight over the years. Back in 1985, Ivan Doig spoke at the Yellowstone Art Center. He revealed that he wrote his books in chunks and somehow put them altogether later on, which I enjoyed hearing because that’s how inspiration generally comes to me too.

Most entertaining was his discussion of research for his This House of Sky, one of my favorites. To check his own memory, he asked the son of the schoolteacher in his book if he had any more information about the woman. The son had become an FBI agent in Denver, so he treated his own mother as a suspect, sending Doig a three-page single-spaced report on his mother!

Doig went on to tell a story about Montana poet Richard Hugo. Beth Ferris, who wrote Heartland, dragged the moping Hugo to Phillipsburg, Montana, where he did not want to go.

“It’s a mining town. I don’t know anything about mining!” he said.

But they wanted to film him there despite his protests. The next day he wrote his notable poem “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg.” Only partially based on the actual Phillipsburg, the town triggered the rest of the poem, becoming one of Hugo’s “triggering towns” for making poems, and making gray his favorite poetic color. As Doig pointed out, 500 years from now we’ll remember Hugo’s Phillipsburg rather than the real one.

The poem resonated with me because my brother-in-law, Harry Knodel, was school superintendent in Phillipsburg. He lived in a house overlooking the town, and we went there to visit his family. Our view was not Hugo’s view, but Hugo’s view was good.

One of my favorite Southern poets, U.S. Poet Laureate Miller Williams, also shared a humorous story. He wrote his poem “The Caterpillar” for his first daughter. By the time his second daughter went to school, the poem had become famous. Her teacher assigned the poem for the class to read and answer seven questions about it. William’s daughter asked if parents could help with the questions. Not knowing that the author of the poem was the father of her student, the teacher said that parents could help. Miller said he could not answer any of the seven questions that were assigned! There’s a lesson there.

When asked about the difference between craft and art, Williams described a hotel fire in New Orleans. People jumped from the 15th or 16th floor. One photographer sacrificed the once-in-a-lifetime shot. He turned his back on the scene to photograph faces in the crowd seeing the falling bodies. We see the event through those faces. Anyone else would have photographed the falling bodies. Art, not craft.

Even at an earlier event, there was poet Robert Frost. When he finished reading his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” an adoring fan in the audience expressed how much she liked the poem and how she thought it was the most beautiful poem in the English language about death.

“Death?” Frost replied. “Where do you see death in the poem?”

Horrified that she might have offended the great poet, the woman gathered herself and timidly pointed out references to darkness and sleep that signified death to her.

Frost cagily said, “Yes, now that you mention it, I can see how the poem says that.”