An Interview with Donna M. Bauerly
AC: In the preface of the biography, you mention that the idea to write Raymond Roseliep’s biography came in 1977, but you did not begin researching or writing until 2003. What happened over that timespan and what prompted you to finally begin the project?
DB: In 1976, Dr. Frank Lehner (editor of the Delta Epsilon Sigma Bulletin [later Journal]) asked me to write a review of Raymond Roseliep's first all-haiku text Flute Over Walden. The beginning of my truly professional relationship with Raymond Roseliep.
Raymond Roseliep always sent me copies of his texts, so you could say I was researching all along with each review I wrote. Two of my Loras College (Dubuque, Iowa) awards had hefty monetary help plus an entire semester free from teaching, twice. Time and money. Very essential.
Then I retired in 2007 with the express purpose of full-time work on the biography. And Loras graciously assigned an office to me in the Academic Resource Center which I still have for my use as of now. All Raymond Roseliep files there plus computer and printer. Voilà. Access is the third essential! All told, the bio took 13 years!
AC: At your talk at the Cradle of American Haiku at Mineral Point, Wisconsin, you said Raymond Roseliep expressed he did not want a biography, but that others learn about him through his poetry. In writing Raymond Roseliep: Man of Art Who Loves the Rose, how did you balance his desire with your own (and others’) desire to see a biography come to fruition?
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An Interview with Donna M. Bauerly
(complete PDF version)
Born in 1934, Donna Bauerly lived for a short time in Potosi, Wisconsin, then moved with her widowed mother and two siblings to live in Dubuque, Iowa (hotbed of haiku), for most of her life. She taught for 52 years in a wide variety of school assignments, the last 36 of them as a professor of literature and writing at Loras College. She retired (sort of) in 2007, serving her last two years in a 13-year tenure as a member of the public school board, and for over a decade serving as president of the Carnegie-Stout Public Library Foundation. She hopes to continue her service to others by tutoring in a nearby elementary school.
An extent of files on Raymond Roseliep are also available for viewing at libguides. loras.edu/special/Roseliep, along with Bauerly's original reviews at myweb.loras. edu/db000020.
Raymond Roseliep: Man of Art Who Loves the Rose, the first project for The Haiku Foundation, is available now through their gift shop at thehaikufoundation. org. A more in-depth look at this book is available in a review by Lisa Higgs on page 70 of this issue.