Interview with Michael DeFrancesco

Interview part 1

RC – This coffee is delicious! What is it?

MD – It's an Italian roast my daughter brought back from her trip to Italy. I don't think it's sold here. Have a croissant.

RC – Thank you. You've written a variety of things, including poems, short stories, art criticism, and a novel. I don't know where we should start. Perhaps I should let you make that decision.

MD – Fair enough. That reminds me of a comment George Burns once made about Gracie Allen. He once said something to the effect that all he had to say to her was something like, "How's your brother?" and she would start yakking non-stop – hilariously, of course.

RC – Are you implying that you also write jokes?

MD – No, that wasn't the implication. But, funny you should mention it, I have written a few jokes. It's not easy. As they say, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." But getting back to your question, if it was a question, I think you want to know how, what, and when did I start writing.

RC – Maybe you could start at the beginning with the when, and work your way through a time sequence.

MD – Sounds good. My earliest attempt at creative writing was poetry when I was 15. Before I started to write poems, I liked to draw, paint, and take pictures. I was very interested in photography at the time. I was in ninth grade. The year was 1969 – just to put it in perspective. During study period, I would look through National Geographic magazines in the school library. I was impressed by the color photographs. I liked the way each photo had a caption below it, indicating whether it was a Kodachrome ® or an Ektachrome ®. That's when I realized I needed to use color slide film if I wanted to take good photographs. Ektachrome ® became my preference. About this time, I read The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. I loved that poem, I still do. It was like a photograph in words. It was colorful. And it was so short that you almost didn't even have to read it. You could look at it, as you would a photograph. It was the perfect bridge between word and image. Not surprisingly, I soon learned that Williams's style of poetry was known as Imagist. At about this same time, I was reading books that were "hip" at the time - the late 1960s, by authors like Hermann Hesse, Par Lagerkvist, and Leonard Cohen. I would read them after my older college-age brother finished reading them. One small book that I purchased on my own - Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen by Alan Watts, was especially influential. The Imagist poetry of William Carlos Williams and Zen philosophy inspired me to write short, descriptive poems. Perhaps my first effort was a short poem titled Black Umbrellae. Being a student in a catholic school, I was also studying Latin.