Imagined Truths: Myths from a Draft-Dodging Poet

History is the story an individual or nation tells itself, in an ongoing process of reinvention, and that story is one of imagined truths.

Richard Lemm grew up in 1950s Seattle, raised by alcoholic grandparents, with an absent mother and a fabled father who died shortly after he was born. To avoid the draft, he left the land of opportunity and moved to Canada in 1967. Now, more than fifty years later, he uses his poet's sensibility to examine his cultural heritage, including the optimism tha...