Steve Schrader will be honored by Teachers & Writers Collaborative on September 18. I won’t be there because I will be teaching, as I’ve been doing regularly since Steve (then the Director) hired me 50 years ago. I left Teachers & Writers after twelve years for a full-time position at Columbia University, where I had started as an adjunct due in large part to Steve’s advocacy. (Without Steve, I might be spending September 18 at Nick’s Bar in Pottersville.)
While in grad school, a classmate asked if I could fill-in for four sessions teaching poetry to kids. I asked my classmate how I could prepare, and he explained that in the writers-in-the-schools game the major league is Teachers & Writers Collaborative. “They have a magazine and publish their own books. Go to their office, they’ll give you stuff.” I pictured a bustling office with writers everywhere, heads buried in their notebooks while staffers fielded phone calls (“Yes sir, we can have two poets and one novelist out there in an hour”) and sent the writers off on their assignments.
The office turned out to be a converted classroom in P.S. 3, an elementary school in the West Village. Only one person was in the office, composing a letter. I waited until he looked up, and shyly introduced myself. "Steve Schrader," he said as he shook my hand. I told him about the program I was going to be working in and asked him for advice. He set aside his work, gave me a cup of Postum, and talked to me for an hour.
I left the office with a pile of free books and magazines, and an embryonic feeling of my future within me. I read all the material, and soon names like Bill Zavatsky and Phillip Lopate were in my head alongside Mark Strand and Adrienne Rich. After four sessions, I was hooked. When I heard there was a new Teachers & Writers book, I I called Steve Schrader, and he invited me to pick it up at his apartment on Riverside Drive.
Steve’s apartment was almost bare. He explained that he’d just gotten divorced and moved into this place. I felt comfortable with Steve (perhaps the most powerful person in the field I was hoping to break into). In his bare apartment, talking over seltzer, I felt like I was tapping into a good-old-nice-boy network. Steve offered me a residency at P.S. 11 in Brooklyn, which was followed by another and another. After a couple of years, Steve commissioned me to write a profile of Teachers & Writers for the American Poetry Review
Under Steve's mentorship my role expanded at Teachers and Writers, and we became friends and confidants (stories to tell another time). We spent time together on Martha's Vineyard:
Bonded over songwriting:
Throughout the years, no matter how close we had become, he would identify himself when he called as "Steve Schrader," just as he did when we first shook hands. Steve put me in the position to transform my life. I've always wanted to make him proud, even writing this.