People ask me when I started writing. It seems that I’ve always been writing.
In junior high I wrote for the newspaper, and in high school was editor of the yearbook. But the first time I actually submitted some writing for publication was after my freshman year in college. A promise of a summer job fell through, so I applied everywhere, and finally landed a job as a cook on a riverboat carrying gravel from central Illinois up the Illinois River to Material Service Corporation in Chicago. The boat was unique, a former U.S. Corps of Engineers stern wheeler. Because the boat pushed barges of gravel, the local owners named her Gravel Gertie, borrowing the name from the offbeat silver-haired crone character in the Dick Tracy comic strip.
The boat hands on Gravel Gertie were all interesting characters, too. George, the engineer who kept the two huge GM diesels running, was well read. In college I had been devouring Hemingway. While Gertie made her way up and down the Illinois River, George and I enjoyed long talks about The Old Man and the Sea.
The deckhands were, literally, a motley crew, who had run through a number of other jobs before ending up on Gravel Gertie. These roughnecks had mouths as filthy as any oceangoing sailors, bragging about all their sexual escapades and brushes with the law. Ironically enough, these macho guys read True Confessions and other trashy magazines. On my maiden voyage to Chicago, I picked up some of their slick magazines, and read a few stories. I figured I could write romances as interesting as these mini-Harlequins.
On the next round trip from central Illinois to Chicago, I brought along my Royal portable, and in my spare time, pounded out a story. The deckhands insisted on reading it, so they were my first experience at read/critique. They said my tale was too sentimental, didn’t have enough sex and violence in it. “Not true to life.”
Being young, naïve, and full of self-confidence, I mailed off my story to True Confessions, receiving my first rejection slip.
Well, it wasn’t my last rejection slip, because I’ve been writing ever since.
I attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, majoring in philosophy and religion. At the time I was trying to make sense of the world through the lens of my Fundamentalist Protestant upbringing. This very limited view of salvation only to the saved and damnation to all others was colliding with my college courses that taught me of many people who had different beliefs and practices, and seemed to lead meaningful, worthwhile lives.
A course on Native American cultures was a real eye-opener for me. Their views of social harmony and oneness with nature convinced me that even if they were not “saved” in the Protestant mode, they were good people and surely could not be eternally damned to Hell.
This comeuppance, that my parochial view of exclusive salvation was too narrow, got me interested in how other races, cultures, and religions made sense of their lives. I decided to go on for a doctorate in the study of the religions of the world.
Impatient to begin graduate school, I dropped out of college and dropped into a graduate program at the University of Chicago. This progressive school allowed me to enroll in a doctoral program without an undergraduate degree, by passing a rigorous entrance exam. That makes me an oddball college dropout without a bachelor’s degree, but with three graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, including a Ph.D.
My doctorate was in the field called History of Religions. The study of religion (History of Religions, or Comparative Religion) is quite different from theology. To oversimplify, theology is religion from the top down, from God to man, truth revealed to humans. The study of religion is bottom up, from the level of people to God, from the human to any form of higher reality, be it nirvana or cosmic unity. Theology is concerned with divine truth. Comparative religion focuses on the human quest for meaning and celebration.
At Chicago I studied many religious traditions. Returning to my undergraduate interest in Native American traditions, I wrote a master’s thesis on the religion of the Zuni Indians. Languages had always fascinated me. After four years of Latin in high school and several years of German in college, in graduate school I took beginning Sanskrit and started Japanese. Because my interest was more in the religious lives of people than in written scriptures and doctrines, I focused on Japanese language and religion. I had been turned off by the Jewish and Christian notions in Genesis that humans have “dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds in the sky . . . and over all the creatures . . . .” I was more in tune with nature and was fascinated by oneness with nature as seen in Shinto.
One influential professor at Chicago was Mircea Eliade, who wrote many pathbreaking works on The Sacred and the Profane, Hinduism, Yoga, and Shamanism. Also, he wrote lengthy novels, such as Forbidden Forest. He encouraged his students to be “creative,” but during graduate school I was overwhelmed with studying language and boning up for Ph.D. exams, too busy to write fiction.
I was fortunate to receive a Fulbright grant to Japan for three years of doctoral research where I studied Japanese mountain religion. My dissertation was later published, and even translated into Japanese. My first book was a college textbook, Japanese Religion, that appeared in 1969, and is still in print, in a fifth edition (with a new title, Religion in Japan). I joke that either I did it right, and was allowed to revise and update it—or I got it wrong, and was forced to correct and improve it.
During my academic career I wrote and published monographs, textbooks, and reference works. As recognition for many publications, my university named me a Distinguished Faculty Scholar. My recent book Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan is being translated into Japanese. “Fuji: Sacred Mountain of Japan,” my 28-minute documentary video of pilgrims climbing this holy peak, won a Philo T. Farnsworth award for best public access video on religion.
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