• Writer for 60 years: letters, journals, poetry, romance novels, detective stories, rhetoric texts, memoirs, clustering and scribbling expository essays with my students on the blackboard
• BA in psychology, University of Iowa, 1965
• Fellowship to Writer’s Workshop, University of Iowa, MFA in English in 1967, thesis The Palakian Monologues and Other Poems
• Publication of a couple dozen poems
• English professor for 30 years at City Colleges of Chicago, where I taught 12 different courses
• 30 semester hours beyond my master’s degree, in pedagogy, whole brain learning, group dynamics, critical thinking, writing across the curriculum, getting students involved in the learning process, etc.
• Took classes at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Jung Institute
• Authored scripts for computer tutorials
• Created Communications 121-where I taught transactional analysis, active listening, Gestalt psychology, general semantics, etc.
• Finalist for Teacher of the Year
• Part time cablevision and real estate salesperson (Member of Searl’s Realty Million Dollar Club)
• Owner and operator of a successful small business
• Volunteer work includes Meals on Wheels, Hospice and teaching prisoners meditation
• Awarded the Elder Whitehead Achievement Award at Calvary Baptist Church in Chicago
• Co leader of the Hattiesburg Mississippi Writer’s Guild
• Spinner of true yarns for a couple of years at the Poplaville Story Tellers Guild
• One of the facilitators at the New Orleans Men’s Group (retreats on shadow work and betrayel)
• Member of the Mississippi Writer’s Guild

A More Poetic Version

From an Iowa farm, I’ve been a scribbler with my stolen silver Cross pen for 60 years.  (The first 6 I bugged mom with questions like, “How will I know if my girlfriend’s The One?”)  Won a fellowship to the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1965, and received an MFA in poetry in 1967. But always hung at Wild Bills with the friction writers, who scored free games on the pinball machines.  (Poets tend to shake them till they tilt.)

Also have a BA in psychology.  We studied the writers for abnormalities and concluded…. (Well, I’d rather not say.) Have published some verse, I guess to rehearse my true passion-writing from memory stories that point to Amor Fati (love of fate.)

Taught English at Chicago City Colleges for 30 years-adored my minority students and the faculty, but Mississippi Mama, she “suggested” one day, “White boy, you can stay too long.”  So now I’m a chicken farmer down in the land of cotton, where ain’t nothen never forgotten, Cross penning in the morns to the tunes of 20 roosters and 2 hens, wondering how come they don’t lay me no eggs.

This damn Yankee co-led the Hattiesburg Writers Guild with Big Eddie Spuryer, Hells Angel sort of thunderer.  We both read tons.  We both adore Opra and are trying to melt our bodies so’s we can becoming boyfriend clone.  We both write flat out at 120 mph, the landscapes whizzing by so fast, our writing fingers developed bruises and fractures.

Am currently revising Changing Colors Book 1: The Long and Winding River to Kashmir’s Door. Been crafting this memoir for the past 12 years.  (Now I know why Mother Marj said her boy is a late bloomer).  My son Steffen Corby Naas, a computer whizzzzz gee knee us, he says this geezer otta blog instead of perfecting my books first.  (I’d planned on that happening around the year 3337.)  So formerly anally retentive, I’ve decided to go with the flow.

Also have created out of the people I love a collection of prose poems, which I’ve titled OLD Black Women and Other Wonders. Have read many of these chants in black Baptist Churches, to clapping hands and amens.  That’s the most rewarding form of publication I’ve had, so far.

My mission, now that both my parents have recently passed into the blue beyond, it to give my gifts to my neighbors, as Marj and Sam did, all their wondrous lives.

I’m hopeful you’d enjoy a more recent photo of the mess that is me.  (Please hum it to Paul Simon’s “Still crazy after all these Irish and Russian years.”)

The praying mantis in my kinky hair is named the Green Muse.  And/or She Who Must Be Obeyed.  I’ve no notion of ever flicking her off her nest.  What the hay, why not let her play?