We lived a life here without parties... there are no parties in New Hampshire, it's against the law. No dinner parties, no cocktail parties, and we had our friends, and saw people... people came to see us on our weekends. When we were first here, lots of people came up from New York and all over the place to check us out. I mean we were doing this weird thing, and they wanted to see what it was like. So a lot of people spent the one night in their life in an unheated house, you know, and people would say, 'It's really beautiful here... it's really... what do you do?'. We didn't have any problem doing, you know... we.. we read books and we read each other, and at supper. I said we were very unromantic lovers... and after being here for a little while, there was candlelit dinners, and... and they were... we were... five years after we were married in a judge's chambers in Ann Arbor, we were married again informally by our minister in the church that we went to. He came over on the Saturday afternoon which was the actual anniversary of the wedding and brought three glasses and a half bottle of wine, and some flowers and read through the ceremony, and we had become romantic lovers after all those years. But, in order to make a living I was writing all sorts of things... poetry always came first and I never shirked the possibility of a poem to write a magazine piece, but man, did I write magazine pieces... I did everything... I've written manuscripts for publishers for money. I edited poetry for a couple of magazines, for a pittance, and I wrote, you know, book reviews for any place that would ask me, pretty much. There's a magazine called Ford Times, which is sent to owners of Ford cars... I managed to write them an article about Gertrude Stein's love for Ford cars. All that's a matter of sort of half a day of looking through Gertrude Stein biographies and then whipping up 500 words or something like that, for $500. I wrote for Yankee Magazine, and I would... after a while, the editors began to call me, instead of me going to the editors, and I could pick and choose. I wrote alot about baseball, I wrote about New Hampshire, I wrote alot of poetry... a lot, and I got to the point where I could collect all my poetry pieces and publish a little collection of poetry essays, or I could... I collected my baseball pieces in... in one book, and collected New Hampshire pieces in others and so on, so that the trick of being a freelancer is to sell everything twice, you know. And another thing that was supporting us very much, was the poetry reading. That is a source of income for poets that was never there until 45 years ago, that is now common and I have probably made, I don't know, 25 or 30% of my income on the poetry reading.
