Welcome to All Roads Will Lead You Home – a poetry blog featuring Alan Berecka, Steven Schroeder and Ken Hada. Our travels in poetry have brought the three of us together, but the longer we know each other, the more we feel like we would have been friends no matter what line of work we might have found ourselves in.
For the record, we are academics and poets, a dubious combination perhaps, but there are other, deeper connections – our love of nature, a good beer, a bad joke, an unforgettable song and forgettable politicians. We met at an academic conference at Baylor University several years ago, and soon thereafter Steve and Alan became regulars with Ken at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival each April in Ada, Oklahoma. During the years, we have all traveled to meet together to read in many and varied venues (university halls, libraries, coffee houses, music festivals, labor meetings, churches and homes) in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, Chicago, etc. Often we will reflect together about our travels just to read a few poems. A recurring, obvious question arises: Why do we do this? The answer we have settled on is: This is why we live.
Though our poetry is varied (Alan’s tends to be more humorous, Steve’s more philosophical, Ken’s more closely bound to the natural world), we feel a bond of friendship that fellow travelers know. We wrestle with the common and the curious, the sacred and the profane, and we marvel at our [in]ability to put it into some form that speaks to each of us. So we humbly, but enthusiastically offer this poetry blog to the reading public. Please join us as each of us regularly puts a poem out into cyber-space. It feels good to us, and if it brings joy or insight or affirmation, then that’s a bonus for all of us. Listening to The Red Dirt Rangers perform recently at The Woody Guthrie Festival in the pasture at Okemah, Oklahoma, we were reminded that “all roads will lead you home” and wondered what better promise could travelers know, what better justification for poetry?