Author Archives: lymangrant

About lymangrant

Lyman Grant is a professor of creative writing and humanities at Austin Community College. He has work at ACC since 1978. He is the author or editor of two textbooks, two books relating to Texas literature, three volumes and a chapbook of poetry. Recently he traveled the United States for a year in a 34-foot RV 5th wheel trailer with his wife and two younger sons.

When One Line Bends Toward the Other

The world offers us a great number of ways of getting from A to B, in our lives, so to speak. These are opportunities in the daily run of life. I view it as just sitting down and doing our job of living. Filling out the job application, paying the bill, responding to the email you do or don’t want to respond to, getting the children to the gymnastics class, remembering the flowers for the anniversary. These are the tasks that if we do them and do them with intent and focus and care will build up and take us where we need or what to go. Continue reading →

Talking With Guys about Love (With Readings and Soundtrack)

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Lyman is in his den.   He’s sitting in his favorite chair. His father’s chair. Big and leathery. It makes him feel masculine just sitting in it. He thinks of pouring himself a drink, a scotch maybe. His dad drank in this chair. A scotch? he asks himself, do I want to get a little high. No. I’ll get sleepy, and I want to finish the new book I’ve been reading. Continue reading →

Recovering from a Good Mother

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The Ghosts in These Muscles

Four years ago, at age thirty-four, I had had enough. I had emptied my bag of life tools. It was time to admit that my life would be either painful repetitions of the past or a scary adventure into new territory. When I came to this realization, circumstances (or was it God? A higher power?) offered a ticket for adventure. This ticket states: “You can change your life if you so desire. But if you accept, you will change your life in ways never imagined.” Continue reading →

The Eros of Revision, Concerning “You Know that Burning”

Looking back, I believe it was with this poem that I first began being a different kind of poet. Shall I name this being “a serious poet”? A “self-aware poet?” I have already said that I began writing poems about 1968, as a sophomore in Temple High School. By the time I wrote this poem, I had graduated from the University of Texas, and then in June 1975, I took off to Texas A&M for graduate school. I had written hundreds of poems in high school and in my senior year at UT; I had written a year’s worth of material in notebooks, and I had pieced together poems for special projects in government and education classes. Now that I think about it, these special projects were in my senior year. Continue reading →

You May as Well Believe, Concerning “How I Came to Write This Poem”

This poem is another of my senior year at the university notebook poems. In the house that I shared with Claud and Neal I had the bedroom in back corner with windows on two sides, facing South and West. My single bed was along the South window and the desk faced out the West window toward the back yard and a creek that most often was dry. The three of us were pretty focused on our school work. Claud was a chemistry major and would spend long nights at the university in the lab doing whatever chemistry students do, and then he would appear without warning in the middle of the afternoon, make a couple of sandwiches put on a stack of Joni Mitchell albums on the stereo, move the speakers into his room, close the door, and fall asleep. We would or wouldn’t see him the next day. Continue reading →