A tip of the mouse to the very first creative writing teacher I ever had, Audrey Elwood, who passed away last Saturday. Audrey Rein (pronounced Ryan), as she was then known, brought Woody Guthrie records into her eleventh grade English class as an example of poetry (very radical in 1962), sponsored the creative writing club at Albany High (where I first heard of Bob Dylan, also in 1962), and refused to be intimidated when HUAC named her boyfriend (later husband) Phil Elwood as a “person of interest” for playing pre-bebop jazz on KPFA radio. She and one other teacher at Albany High, Charles Clarke, my social studies teacher who doubled as a teamster in his off hours, were the only reasons I even bothered to go to school. When poetry finally opened up for me that year, in the form of William Carlos Williams’ The Desert Music, it was Audrey Rein who had prepared me for that.

I saw Audrey & Phil from time to time at music events long after I got out of high school, the last time at the memorial concert for Kate Wolf. Once, many moons before, my first wife & I were hitch-hiking out to a theater in San Francisco that was right out by the beach, called I think the Surf, in order to see Jean-Luc Godard’s latest flick, Weekend, when Audrey & Phil – on their way to see the same film – stopped to pick us up. They hated it, Shelley & I loved it, and I began to sense just how the chasm between generations might impact even like-minded folk.

Everyone should have an Audrey Rein or two in their school career – I was lucky (in good part because the Albany school district attracted intellectuals who just didn’t want to move away from Berkeley to pursue academic careers) to have had four or five.