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Fathers, Sons, and North Dakota: Cultivating the Ties That Bind on the Agrarian Landscape By Ryan M. Taylor
One reality I’ve resigned myself to is that I’ll never get every book read that ought to be read. That’s one reason I appreciate book recommendations to help me sift through all that might interest me. Several years ago, a friend recommended Iron John by poet Robert Bly to me. It’s subtitled “A book about men,” and even though I wasn’t a father at the time I read it, I was a devoted son. Now that I am a father of two sons and a daughter, but have lost my own father to age and Parkinson’s, I find myself thinking often of the themes I discovered in Iron John. I read a little of everything, and although poetry and mythology aren’t regular residents of my literary nightstand, I’m not afraid of them either. I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to Robert Bly, and, if you Google him, you’ll find a range of opinions on him and his work, but I thank this poet laureate of Minnesota for getting me to think about my father, fatherhood, and male mentoring in a new light.
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