The Whole Inexplicable Business

I was a professor at San Diego’s Southwestern College between 1996 and 2003, where poet Steve Kowit and I were colleagues. At the age of fifty-two I suffered a massive stroke that ended my teaching career. I lost the ability to walk, read, and spell.

Steve worked with me on my English skills over the phone every Sunday morning for thirteen years, helping me relearn the alphabet and build words. Steve would slowly read a sentence, and I had to write it on a piece of paper. He would read the sentence to me over and over.

Steve was a great friend and an amazing person: He was a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization concerned about the war crimes being committed by the state of Israel against Palestine. He started the Animal Rights Coalition, the first animal-rights group in San Diego, and was a vegetarian almost his whole life. He even respected insects. If a fly buzzed in his classroom, Steve told his students that no one was allowed to harm it.

Thank you for the moving account of Steve Kowit’s life [“The Whole Inexplicable Business,” July 2015], and for consistently including his poetry in your magazine. I belong to an organization called Veterans for Peace, and one of our goals is to shatter the myth that there is an irreconcilable gap between those of us who fought in the American war in Vietnam and those who fought against it. Many of us who didn’t stand up to the authorities who sent us to war appreciate Kowit’s stance as a conscientious objector. I am one of those people.