From Lynx House to Eastern Washington’s MFA program, poet and writer Chris Howell’s ‘seeping wisdom’ spans decades

Lynx House was a real house first. The Lynx was a painting rescued from the dump and hung on the wall. The home was shared by friends going through the University of Massachusetts’ master’s of fine arts program together.

The Lynx was also borrowed from a line of “Cantos,” an unfinished modernist poem written by Ezra Pound: “O Lynx keep watch on my fire.”

“We were quite taken with that, so we just put the name on our magazine,” Howell said.

The “we” referenced was Howell, David Lyon and Helena Minton.

The Lynx was a reading series, then a magazine and then a publisher of books, established in 1975. Now, that press has published 257 books and existed a little over half a century. What started as a project among friends is now solely Howell’s, and the evidence can be found in his basement: boxes of books. But Howell cannot let go, because Lynx House Press is still all of those things, all of the writers he has published. And all of the relationships behind making those books.

The pitcher poet

Howell grew up on a homestead property right outside of Portland, in a community created by World War II veterans centered around a Lutheran church. He struggled to read, right up until the summer going into fourth grade, when his mom taught him using phonics. From that point on, Howell read anything.

“I was rabidly reading, I think, all the time,” Howell said.

Baseball was his passion from a young age.

“I was throwing in the low 90s in high school. And I thought, ‘Hey, you know, why not?’ I could do this, that’d be great,” Howell said.

Pacific Lutheran University accepted him on an athletic scholarship. There he met the woman who would become his first wife. She left school, and Howell eventually transferred to Oregon State University to finish his degree. The Vietnam War began, and in his transfer, he did not have the health education requirement needed to maintain his deferment, so Howell joined the Naval Reserve and was sent to military journalism school.

He remembered getting on a bus in Rhode Island to get to the first ship, but the bus would not start. Finally, the driver said they would need to push it to get it started.

“So all of the sailors and soldiers got off the bus, pushed it down the driveway to start it and then had to run to catch up to it,” Howell said, laughing. “It was an interesting way to start.”

Over two years, he was stationed on three different ships. Most of his time was in the North Atlantic, with only a few weeks in the Western Pacific, and he never went ashore in Vietnam.

Next, Howell attended Portland State University for his master’s degree in English with a specialization in Scandinavian literature, all the while enrolling in poetry workshops. This was when he first met the poet William Stafford, at a reading.

“I’d never met him, been reading his poems for years,” Howell said. “Liked him right away. He was a sweetheart.”

Making the worksheet

After finishing that degree, he pursued an MFA at University of Massachusetts. There, he studied under poet Joseph Langland.

“He was deeply friendly, but he didn’t seem to be warm in a way, either,” Howell said. “He loved his students, and he was very frank with the students.”

Students would submit poems by putting them in Langland’s mailbox. Langland would then cut the spare paper, paste them on legal-sized sheets and make copies for the class. But not all of the poems made it onto the sheet. Howell went the whole first semester without a poem on the sheet.

“I was writing bales every day,” Howell said. “I wrote 100 poems in that semester. Trying to get onto the worksheet. And I always thought that Langland figured out that I needed to write a lot more. And so he just pushed me to it without letting me know what he was doing.”

Howell, Lyon and Minton then moved into the Lynx house, where he made deep connections with fellow students.

“It was a constant stream of writers coming through,” Lyon said. “You know, anyone who’s touring usually headed up on the couch for the night. We would gather together and play those grad school writer games. Each person would write a line in turn as we went around the room until all the wine was gone.”

Lyon said after starting Lynx Magazine, the group quickly realized running a magazine was unsustainable, but that a book press could work.

“And it’s easier to publish books also because the (National Endowment for the Arts) at that time was very generous,” Lyon said. “We published, frankly, what we thought was the best work that we came across. It so happened, a lot of that work was by minority writers and by women at a time when they were having trouble getting published, and which made us kind of darlings of the NEA.”

They also brought on Robert “Bob” Abel, who edited fiction for the press.

“He was very efficient. Having a lot to do didn’t distress him, and he always got things done,” Howell said.

Toward the end of his time with the MFA program, Howell’s relationship with his wife ended. He returned to the Pacific Northwest for teaching jobs at Portland State University, Mt. Hood Community College and then Colorado State University. In Colorado, Yusef Komunyakaa was his student and Lynx House Press went on to publish Komunyakaa’s book, “Lost in the Bonewheel Factory.”

Press, books and Get Lit!

Returning to Oregon to teach, Howell’s daughter, Emma, was born in 1981.

“I think I put more pressure on the writing because of (becoming a father),” Howell said. “I thought I had to be better, but I also had an expanded emotional life because of that.”

Howell and Emma’s mom split, and Howell took a teaching job in Kansas. In 1988, he married his wife, Barbara Anderson, and in 1990, they had a son, Evan. Chris frequently traveled to see Emma.

At a writing conference in Kansas, he met a woman named Nance Van Winckel. The two became fast friends. While at Kansas, he also became closer with Stafford. Since Stafford was from the area, the university brought him in frequently, and Stafford would stay with Howell.

Though Howell was the director of creative writing at Emporia State University, when a position became available at Eastern Washington University, Van Winckel was already working there, and knew Howell would be interested, as he had been eager to be closer to his daughter.

“I thought this was a great job,” Howell said. “I was really pleased to be able to apply, and to actually get it made a big difference in my life.”

Given his experience with Lynx House Press, he took on the responsibilities of Willow Springs Magazine. Since James McAuley, a founding poetry professor in creative writing, was retiring, Howell would also be taking on Eastern Washington University Press.

McAuley had resurrected the existing EWU Press, which formed in the 1970s. Then came Christine Holbert.

“I decided to go back to school, but I didn’t tell my family,” Holbert said. “I just applied to Eastern, and I was accepted. And so the day that I announced that I was going back to college is the day that my husband asked me for a divorce. (Through all) the tears and craziness, I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ And I thought, ‘Well, you’re going to go to school. That’s what the universe told you.’ ”

Holbert was wandering the administration building and saw on the bulletin board a three-by-five card.

“It said EWU Press is looking for creative writing majors to intern at the press. And I thought, ‘Oh god, I’ve always loved books.’ So I called the number, and this Irish man answered, and I said, ‘Listen, I saw one of your little three-by-five cards. You’re looking for interns. I’m an undergraduate English major, but I’m also in my 40s, so if you give me a job, I’ll do it and I’ll do it correctly.’ ”

The Irishman was McAuley, then EWU MFA poetry professor, and he was happy to have Holbert involved. In fact, they managed to create an interdisciplinary degree in publishing, and Holbert was the first to enroll.

Holbert stayed involved, which is how she first started working with Howell.

“I then applied and got into the masters of publishing courses, and I saw that the graduate students all wanted to also get some editing experience,” Holbert said. “I thought, ‘Well, none of them are screaming to design books, so maybe I can get that.’ ”

Holbert kept offering to design covers for Howell.

“He gave me some of some of the books to design, and even if other people were going to be designing them, I learned how to typeset,” Holbert said. “I learned how to design that way and then I took a poetry class with him as well. And yeah, we became good friends.”

In 1998, EWU hired Gregory Spatz as a visiting professor. Spatz, who became the program director in 2001, was just in time to witness the beginning of a new literary festival. Holbert knew that Howell had been one of the founders of Portland Poetry Festival. She was trying to convince him to replicate that here.

Scott Poole, who had been the EWU Press managing editor, got on board. Poole later went on to be the founding director of Wordstock, now Portland Book Festival. Howell warned Holbert of some of the difficulties of the endeavor, but ultimately supported it.

“(Howell) had to be the professor who sponsored it,” Holbert said, laughing. “He had to keep control of me, otherwise the administration wouldn’t let us start this thing.”

They rented out what is now the Bing Crosby Theater. There was a gigantic chalkboard – anyone could write their name on the board.

“Denis Johnson was one of the featured readers,” Spatz said, of the late “Train Dreams” author. “And I remember, like, I had no idea what was going on or who was going to read, and I walked in and there was Denis Johnson on stage, reading ‘Emergency,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ ”

“Emergency” is a short story from Johnson’s book “Jesus’ Son” that was originally published in the New Yorker.

Though it didn’t go by this name quite yet, this was the first Get Lit!, now in its 28th year.

After graduation, Holbert created her own publishing house, Lost Horse Press. Over the years, Howell has done editing work for her and she has done design work for him.

As of only a few weeks, Holbert is publisher emerita for Lost Horse Press.

In 2010, the university decided to pull the plug on EWU Press. Howell knew that students were getting jobs based on the publication experience at the press. So the program decided to create Willow Springs Books, a book press that would have a short story collection contest.

“Many of the students came because of Willow Springs Magazine and the press,” Holbert said. “This meant that they could get some get some experience, because you get a degree in poetry, it’s pretty hard to get a job in that field.”

In 2021, EWU cut the nonfiction sequence.

On the page

Van Winckel expressed her admiration for Howell’s approach to students’ work.

“He talks to students about finding the energy centers in their work, and then trying to compress the poem around those things that are sending out energy to the reader,” Van Winckel said.

Former Spokesman-Review columnist and EWU MFA creative writing graduate Shawn Vestal had the experience of taking a poetry workshop from Howell.

“He didn’t cover your poem with marks, but the ones he made would open your eyes to what you might do better in that poem,” Vestal said. “He didn’t have that much to say, but boy, what he said just echoed in your mind.”

EWU fiction professor Samuel Ligon first encountered Howell when he joined the staff in 2004.

“One of the things that sometimes happens in poetry is that we get a kind of obscurity, and so people don’t like poetry because it feels obscure to them,” Ligon said. “Chris’ poems deal in very difficult subject matter, because all poems do, right? Like death, everything we do as human beings. But the thing about what’s striking about Chris’ poems is how incredibly clear they are and precise and beautiful.

“Furthermore, Chris is funny as hell, and he’s all the more funny because of his Eeyore demeanor.”

Ligon described Howell’s voice as quiet, and said, “You have to strain to hear him like, ‘Oh my god, is this guy gonna be a quiet talker?’ He’s very quiet. And suddenly you realize how funny his poems are.”

Ligon gave the example of “Checkers,” from his collection “Gaze,” in which Buddha and Jesus are playing a game of Checkers.

When Melissa Kwasny’s poetry collection, “Thistle” won the Idaho Prize in 2006, she hadn’t heard of the judge, Howell. Her friend, Patricia Goedicke, couldn’t believe that.

“She said, ‘You don’t know who Christopher Howell is? He’s a wonderful poet,’ ” Kwasny said. “And she gave me all these books of his that she had to read.”

After Kwasny read them, she couldn’t believe it, either.

“Chris is one of my very favorite poets now, and I had been reading poetry for a very long time,” Kwasny said.

When Howell visited Missoula, Goedicke introduced them, and they’ve been friends ever since, exchanging work.

“I think Chris should be really well known,” Kwasny said. “And I think he has a loyal and widespread fan club, people that know his work. But he’s not a self-promoter.”

Her favorites of his work are “Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected” and “Light’s Ladder.” “Light’s Ladder” is a book of poems by Howell, dedicated to his daughter, also a poet. In 2005, it won the Washington State Book Award, though author Shann Ray Ferch said, “Personally, ‘Light’s Ladder’, I think should have won every prize that America offers: Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, among many other books of his that are worthy.”

One of the central themes is grief. In 2001, Emma died in an accident.

Days before hearing the news, Spatz couldn’t get “The Ashokan Farewell” by Jay Ungar out of his head, and kept playing it on his fiddle. Three or four days later, he received a call from the program secretary with news about what had happened to Emma, and that Howell wanted to speak with him. Over the phone, Howell gave him the memorial date.

“And he’s like, I was wondering if you could come and play ‘The Ashokan Farewell,’ ” Spatz said.

If becoming a father had put pressure on Howell’s work, losing Emma deeply affected it.

“I think I had a kind of elegiac turn of mind to begin with,” Howell said. “Well, it certainly focused that, and probably sharpened my tendency to explore the past, to find the emotional content in it.”

In “Family Values,” the first poem in a series of poems called “The Fire Elegies,” Howell wrote, “A man sprints to his burning house/ with a tin cupful of water/ and casts it savagely into huge/ flames rising like birds/ or the resurrected souls of a choir./ And when he stands, cup dangling/ from a finger, he knows that having/ fed on him like this, the world will/ for awhile forgive his little/ life, and he will pity even the earnest/ neighbors with their casseroles and cakes.”

EWU Press posthumously published Emma Howell’s book, “Slim Night of Recognition”; at the time, Howell wasn’t the press director.

“It was sort of an announcement that Emma had been here,” Howell said. “An announcement that would stay, at least for a while, as a monument to her. I would not have felt that way if I hadn’t thought the work deserved it. But it certainly did deserve it. She would have gone on to do spectacular things.”

Shakespeare Club

In the opening of his latest book, “The Grief of a Happy Life,” Howell dedicated the opening poem “for the boys in the Shakespeare Club.”

For the past 15 years, a group has been gathering monthly to discuss Shakespeare plays. The group is composed of Howell, author Jess Walter, Vestal, Ligon, Gonzaga University English professor Dan Butterworth and Anthony Flinn, EWU English professor emeritus.

Walter explained the start of the group as this: “Shawn Vestal and Sam and I were sort of bemoaning the fact that we had only read a limited bit of Shakespeare,” Walter said. “Maybe what they had you read in high school or college. So it was, hey, let’s get together and read this and then to have these professors who’ve taught it or who studied its poetry, it’s like getting to take this amazing seminar, very small seminar, with experts.”

Most in Howell’s orbit note that friendship is central to him. Walter said of Howell, “I don’t know if I know a better and more decent person. … He’s been such a leader in the world of writing here. Publishing so many great writers, bringing in so many events, and he just does it all with that kind of, that Chris-Howell-combination of genial, good nature and the kind of seeping wisdom that is in everything he writes and in the conversations you have with him.”