DeWitt Henry, mon sembable, mon frere, was two years behind me at Amherst, but way ahead of me in life. While the rest of us were yearning for graduate school, he was already a writer; he took over the college litmag as a sophomore.
He presided over Ploughshares for its first 20 years.His gathering of autobiographical essays, Safe Suicide, just published by Red Hen Press, smote me with its harrowing accounts of…fathering…litmagging….refilling a printer ink cartridge…running the Boston Marathon as a bandit….getting older….DeWitt tells it by the numbers: how much he earned, how many fingers-wide his pregnant wife was dilated when they reached the hospital, how much they paid for their house, how much a lavish fundraiser actually brought to the bottom line.Read more.“