DUNE 7 BLOG

Monday, April 17, 2006

Meeting Frank Herbert

I moved to Port Townsend, Washington in 1973 to pioneer "Poetry in the Schools" in rural areas for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Washington State Arts Commission. The following week, the local paper had brief notices of two new residents -- Frank Herbert, novelist and Bill Ransom, poet. I remembered Frank from my time at the University of Washington (1967-70) when he and Tom Robbins both wrote for The Seattle P-I. Frank took an early anti-war stance and participated in numerous student demonstrations in Seattle. During that period, the Helix from Seattle was one of the country's best underground newspapers, and one issue featured an hilarious, satirical article about the mine-shaft gap between the Soviet Union and the United States. This humorous article set the "missile gap" debate into perspective. The byline was "H. Bert Frank," a thinly disguised attempt to stay clear of trouble at the P-I.

The Port Townsend paper indicated that Frank preferred to write in the mornings, as I did, so I dropped a postcard to "H. Bert Frank" at his Ivy Street address inviting him to coffee "some morning when you're done writing and the time's convenient." He showed up on our porch two days later at about 11am with his coffee mug in hand.

"Ransom," he said, (he always called me "Ransom" when joking around), "you're the only one who ever got it."

Thus started our tradition of after-writing coffee, usually at Frank's house, nearly every day that he and Bev lived on the Peninsula. Coffee led to talk, talk led to stories and stories led to a novelette, three novels and a lot of fun, but that's a tale for another time.

Bill Ransom
http://www.sfwa.org/members/ransom