About Marilyn

Afterwards Dad became state purchasing agent in Lincoln, where I joined the family and entered the University of Nebraska. Smartest thing I ever did. Classes were tough and some faculty seemed to delight in testing my basic assumptions. “You're against labor just because your dad is?” one asked. “What about the Wobblies?” I spent a lot of time in the library, looking up unfamiliar words, trying to argue my way out of this corner or that, but I loved the way the professors stretched me.

Then my parents said I couldn’t major in English, I had to choose something practical like education. Or nursing. We finally compromised on journalism. In my senior year, Dad took us to Washington D.C. where I watched him testify against the Teamsters in front of Robert Kennedy’s McClellan committee. On assignment for a journalism class, I took copious notes.

After I graduated and began writing society news headlines for a Lincoln newspaper, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road fell into my hands and changed my life. See “Those beats!” Soon I met a friend in the Denver Greyhound station. We stood gazing at a gigantic United States map. Where would we go next? My friend closed her eyes, I twirled her around, and she pointed her finger. In no time we were New Orleans bound, then California, then Portland. And finally, by myself, to New York.

New York’s impact made Kerouac’s look slight. After I’d been in the city two weeks, I’d seen so many standard sights that I became a tour guide. Eventually, (see Feminism) I had a job at Good Housekeeping, working as a part-time secretary and slush reader. Slush. Unsolicited manuscripts. Each Thursday they came up from the mailroom, stacked dozens high in three or four big storage boxes. I had two days to determine if any manuscript was “right for Good Housekeeping.”

Soon I had a husband, a son, a better job, but I was not content. I entered psychoanalysis, which proved to be the fourth catalyst in my life, after the University, Kerouac, and New York. Before long, I broke out of everything: my marriage, my parenthood, my disdain for journalism, even out of my job. My last paycheck let me live like a beach bum on Martha’s Vineyard all summer. I wrote, real work: poetry, chapters of a novel, short stories. When I returned to New York that fall, I changed professions, swapping journalism for academia by teaching in Pratt Institute’s English and Humanities Department. I continued to write and began to read my poetry in public. (See Performance).

A lot has happened since. In addition to my Pushcart prize-winning “Pricksong” and my book-length poem, The Cretan Cycle, more than seventy of my six hundred poems have been published, some in journals such as New American Review, Sunbury, New England Journal, and Manhattan Poetry Review and others in newspapers, newsletters, or anthologies. My first on-line poetry publication, “Peace March 1967,” can be seen at Howling Dog Press. I’ve read my poetry in more than 30 different venues in six states (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska). And I studied with Allen Ginsberg in the Zen Mountain Monastery near Woodstock, NY.

Besides poetry, I’ve written Marcella, a novel, and Great Plains Patchwork, a memoir. My writing has appeared in England, Australia, India, Japan, Canada, Denmark, as well as the U.S. More than thirty of my articles have been published in serials such as Cosmopolitan, Journal of the West, and Big Mama Rag. Four pieces became nationally syndicated news features for Associated Press or NANA. Eight little magazines, such as Kansas Quarterly, have published my short stories. As a journalist, several hundred of my news features and stories appeared in Show Business, Gift & Tableware Reporter, Handbags & Accessories, Home Furnishing Daily, The Hastings [NE] Daily Tribune, and The Daily Nebraskan.

I’ve seen my work performed on stage and used to create art. In 1976, I formed my own publishing company, Omega Cottonwood Press, which initially published broadsides and later chapbooks.

The University of Nebraska named me a Master Alumnus for distinction in writing. My manuscripts, letters, journals and other papers are now in The Marilyn Coffey Collection in the Archives of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.

When, at eleven, I decided to become a writer, I thought writing would be a good profession because I’d never have to retire. And that’s true. I no longer teach (I’m a retired associate professor of English, having taught at Boston University, Pratt Institute, and Fort Hays [KS] State University, tenured both at Pratt and FHSU), but I look forward to my hours at the keyboard as eagerly as I did when I first began to snatch words from thin air and the world seemed on fire.

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