FAQ:

Ben Doller

An extended bio from the author

Thank you for your question. I was born Ben Doyle in Warsaw, rural western New York, and went to school in both Belfast and Cuba, New York—worldly names for local places. We had some cheap acres of woods and a house my parents were perpetually constructing from torn-down churches and barns. Agrarian hobbyists, chickens and dogs, Mother Earth News, four younger sibs, and a wood stove that I almost burned it all down with one day when I noticed that we were blazing the wrong wood. I had glasses and a stocked pond and plenty of paths and forts where no one else was allowed lest they suffer my booby-traps. My dad poured some concrete and put up a basketball hoop at the top of a very long hill. It made one soften his shot.

Then my parents moved the family to West Virginia. I made some friends there and started playing in bands. I wrote lyrics for the songs. At the time, I thought that was the important part. I tend to think of all literature as accompaniment to some simple score.

Back to New York state, the homemade home. Senior year. I didn’t have a band anymore, but still wrote lyrics. I didn’t really think that I could sing, but I auditioned for a musical, and I discovered that I really couldn’t sing unless I pretended I was a character. I got the role of lead monster.

Went to college, the only one that didn’t make me write an essay. Majored in Viz Art, but ran out of $$ for paint. Switched to Poetry. Lewis Turco (Mr. Book of Forms) taught there, taught well there, made us write in every traditional form, learn the names and nuances of each. When you finish that, you get a literal “poetic license,” a certificate and permission to never have to touch such a form again. He also had us buy Messerli’s Language Poetries: An Anthology—that stuff was formal too! I left there a little early, moved back to West Virginia. Finished up undergrad, made more music, wrote poems. Went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in ‘98. My first book, Radio, Radio, won the Walt Whitman Award. This was 2000. Y2K luck.

Back to West Virginia, this time teaching. Then to Ohio (Denison University). Then I met Sandra Miller in Iowa and everything got better. Then we got married in a silent Quaker ceremony on a New York State Fingerlake. Then we got our dog, Ronald Johnson, in Ohio. I recommend him and his namesake. Then to Virginia and Boise, then to California, then to Colorado, then back to California. We merged our last names there; we’re both Dollers now. We write together, and separately, in the same house, full of instruments and typewriters, wherever that house may be.