Teachers » Robert McDowell

Robert McDowell’s path as a writer, teacher, and speaker is a long journey from the conventional to the unusual. Discovering that he was a poet at age 11 after a summer reading and reciting the Romantics in a thicket cave he made on the grounds of the Ramona Convent, Robert set his sights on a life of writing poetry and sharing it.

After earning a B.A. at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied closely with George Hitchcock, Raymond Carver, and David Swanger, Robert attended Columbia University on a Woolrich Fellowship. With an MFA in Poetry, Robert returned to California for two years before becoming writer-in-residence and an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

After teaching an array of courses there for six years and launching the influential literary magazine, The Reaper, with the poet Mark Jarman, Robert left teaching to travel in Europe with his future wife, Lysa McDowell. On their return, Robert accepted a one-year teaching position at UC Santa Cruz, and with the encouragement and backing of The Hudson Review’s Frederick Morgan, Kayak’s George Hitchcock, Edgar Lansbury, and the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York, he agreed to create (with Mark Jarman and Lysa McDowell) Story Line Press, an independent, nonprofit book publisher focusing primarily on poetry and books about poetry.

For the next twenty-two years, Robert’s creative life was split between writing, editing, and publishing the writing of others, and only tangentially connected to the Academy. While steadily producing his own work, Robert assisted the careers of hundreds of authors in 240 titles issued by Story Line Press. Books included stars, neglected writers, and newcomers; several received prestigious awards, and the press was regarded as one of the most important literary publishers in the United States.

But by the late 1990s, Robert’s interests were increasingly moving beyond the life he was living. Witnessing and becoming involved in a series of dramatic accidents and life-threatening situations, Robert became convinced that a major life change beckoned. He realized that this called for more focus on his own writing and speaking as a means to deepen his spiritual practice and help others to do the same.

With the publication in summer 2008 of Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions and the launch of www.robertmcdowell.net, Robert began expanding this work at forums around the country, on radio, and online.

Listen to Robert being interviewed by Brooke here: