Book by Daniel Lusk

Girls I Never Married

Wind Ridge Books, 2014

Memoir. Daniel Lusk was born in Iowa at the end of the Great Depression to devoutly religious parents who “were renters and debtors, the working poor.” Like many writers of his generation, his writing developed against the backdrop of unrest and amid the struggle for cultural change in America—Civil Rights and Vietnam, the Women’s Movement, the sexual revolution, communes, rock-and-roll—during the latter half of the 20th Century. From country preacher, ranch hand, factory worker, and jazz singer to itinerant poet and teacher and university lecturer and the women young and old who influenced his life and work. 

“You don't have to know Lusk personally to enjoy taking this literary trip down memory lane with him. His has been a remarkable evolution, and he recounts it with the depth of insight and sublimity of language you'd expect from an exceptional poet...”
Rick Kisonak, Seven Days of Vermont

Sample from Chapter 14: Lip-Synching T.S. Eliot

“B— was the sort of woman a writer puts into a novel so he can read about her for the rest of his life. In any photograph she is the one with the soft blaze on her forehead, as if favored by the light. Sitting among the sixth grade students in her classroom in a fine wool skirt and silk, cream-colored blouse, she looks as if she had dressed herself while driving to work and has not quite finished, which in fact she had, buttons and all…”

– from Girls I Never Married by Daniel Lusk