Douglas Roberts

I didn't always enjoy writing. But something happened in my senior year of high school. The teacher told us she would be teaching us college preparatory English and it would be a lot harder than standard high school English. I thought that sounded pretty sucky and wanted to drop out. I only got a C- in the course.

But when I started college in the fall at Rio Grande College in Rio Grande Ohio, I received an A on my first English compostion paper and was told by the instructor to see the teacher in charge of publishing the student newspaper. I was instantly made the assistant editor and writer of the college newspaper during my freshman and sophmore years. Every week I would drive our newspaper advisor's Chevy II to Ravenswood, West Virginia and deliver it to the printer where we would go over last minute details. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

When I returned from the Army in 1972, I enrolled in the graduate school of journalism at Kent State. I wrote pieces about my time in Iran and also about the oil politics of the Middle East. A couple of them got published in the Daily Kent Stater.

The best job I ever had was as the editor/photographer/writer for an arts newsletter called ArtReach News. ArtReach was one of the pioneering arts organizations that sparked the movement to create an arts district in Columbus, Ohio's Short North district.

Prior to this book I guess my greatest claim to publishing fame was poetry. A self-publisher of several hand-made chapbooks, my inspiring poems of Sufi and Zen themes found acclaim when they were published no less than 16 times in Heart and Wings Journal.

But as a former anti-war activist I felt a growing need to come out of "retirement", inspired by the 2009 phony elections in Iran which sparked an (as yet) unsuccessful uprising. I figured that back in the 1970s I was pretty good at fomenting dissent, shutting down campuses, and pissing off U.S. leaders who defended the lost cause of the Vietnam war. "But did I still have that kind of mojo?" I wondered.

After giving it some careful thought, I figured that with careful wording I could create a three-fer:

1. Tell the world about getting drafted and being sent -- not to Vietnam -- but to Iran where I worked in the Classified Message Center in the equivalent of the Iranian Pentagon. I wanted to spin a nail-biting yarn exposing the repressive era of the Shah.

2. To re-visit some of my own lingering Vietnam era issues in the story; and last but certainly not least

3. Stick my thumb in the eye of Iran's current ruling elites.

Conclusion: My mojo's still there and stronger than ever, if I do say so myself.