Leigh Herrick
What to say, and how much for a bio? I’ll start here: I turned down an invitation to apply to be a Rhodes Scholar as I was prepping to graduate with a double-major, summa, etc., from the University of Minnesota. I have an extreme distaste for bureaucracy, and though I loved studying, and love learning, I never loved the problems inherent in institutions, even as a student, and I didn’t want to have to deal with them as an employee. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to do what I had planned on doing 12 years earlier, what I’d been doing—decidedly—since age 18: I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to write. I did not want to be yet another teacher, writing, or yet another writer, teaching writing. I wanted to write. So that is what I do.
Sometimes people wonder how one becomes a poet, a writer. That is almost always answered with a long history of the writer’s life. Few people are writers simply because, over a one-year period, they blogged and happily some editor offered a book deal. That’s the fairy tale version, not impossible, but don’t count on it. The writing life is a must do condition, and usually starts with habits early on, typically diaries, and a love of reading.
I had my first diary when I was 13, and I actually wrote my first children’s book and my first long poem when I was not quite 11. I still have both of these, worn and stored in my file cabinet for safe-keeping. They were part of English assignments given in 5th grade, a wonderful way to teach writing and composition, while encouraging literary creativity. Get ready to laugh. Here's the cover and first two pages of my children's book, a morality tale called The Little Brute:
And here's my first piece of Flash Fiction, from 8th grade, age 14:
It is pretty hysterical, no doubt!!! I've even got it "headed" with front-page news/review-style remarks like: ONE OF THE BEST STORIES I EVER READ -New York Times and A diary found in a dead man's home. -The Wednesday Chronicles and UNBELIEVABLE.... -Saturday Review. I was to write my story following this lead: "After the last atomic war, Earth was dead; nothing grew, nothing lived. The last man sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door." Well, it was a baby, a martian baby, and the man named her Martianaliny. Being Martian she grew to full womanhood within 5 minutes. They share stories, he about his planet she about hers. They are in Springfield, Illinois. {LOL! I was probably going after the symbolism: Spring...field... already into linguistic signs!} They fall in love, but she dies. He can't bear life without her. I imply he kills himself. He leaves a P.S. that reads, "If ever there be another human on earth and they find me and my diary PLEASE warn the people, let there be PEACE!" The story takes place in 2081 and ends with a footnote regarding lessons to Mankind. Yup. That's me. And those who know me? Pretty sure they're ROTFL by now!
I had additional classes in high school: Poetry, Shakespeare, literature. Now my early tendencies were solidified: I loved studying books. I loved thinking about them, writing about them. I loved poetry and creative writing, and all this came to me within the cultural frame that included the women’s movement and women poets like Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath were getting listed on syllabi. I was thrilled. Women had never before been included in my lit classes. I began taking poetry seriously as a vocation in 1977 and I haven’t stopped since.
But my poetic grounding, my ear for rhythm, my sometimes irritating ability to remember the rhythmic and the musical (like commercial jingles from the 60s that just cling to my mind, unwanted webs sprouting at will) is something I seem to have been born with, along with my general inclination toward the arts, particularly dance and music. Music has always been a part of my life, whether it was the top 40, classical, or rock, so…
...after I bought a piano when I was 18 and subsequently sold it because I was young and kept moving...after I bought my guitars, learning first folk music and then intermediate-level classical, renaissance and baroque (I was ambitious!)...after college (12 years after) yet in the same year I was awarded a major grant AND a residency fellowship: Enter the drums
I began drumming in 2000, on frame drums and conga. I followed the path of Afro-Caribbean (mostly Afro-Cuban) conga playing more than anything, but I’ve also picked up a little tabla playing, Middle Eastern tradition. I have been extremely fortunate to have great drumming teachers, true masters in their own right. My drumming path has led to such bliss, such enlightening Otherly Awarenesses, that it can only be expressed through the combining of disciplines: Poetry and Music: Nothing new under the sun, no doubt, since the first poets were shamans and the first poems could be reasonably called shamanic chants. Still, I saw potential to do something more, to run a depth into my poetry through the addition of music that allows both music and poem to stand in compliment to each other, even if in seemingly stark contrast.
The result? I take my entire life into my practice. How could it be otherwise? The music, the writings; cultures I’ve studied; the places I’ve been. I take it all, having learned how to listen, how to hear, subsequently enabling myself to maintain an artistic environment within that allows me to thrive, facilitating the transformation and translation of all that goes on in my head, daily, into art.
