Dennis Nils Drogseth – 50th Reunion Essay

Dennis Nils Drogseth

6 Bay Road #36

Newmarket, New Hampshire 03857

drogseth@dennisnils.com

603-781-3882

Spouse(s): Audrey Drogseth (32 years as of 2018)

Child(ren): Melanie (1989), Nathaniel (1991)

Career: Marketing for IBM and Cabletron; Analyst with Enterprise Management Associates; novelist and playwright

Avocations: Jogging, staying at least somewhat current with what’s going on in the world, reading when I can find time

College: Saybrook

There are seven things that stand out in my adult life as both turning and teaching points.

Yale is one, and in this essay, I’ll start with Yale and end with Yale, as first and last. Yale was an arena of community and achievement, all with a sense of humor—even in the architecture—that would remain unique in my experience.

My 13 years in Woodstock, NY, was another turning point. I worked in a film company, did art reviews, and got to know Phil Guston. I also wrote two plays and two musicals.

The third turning point, while I was still in Woodstock, was the disappearance of my best friend from when I was an AFS student in Concepcion, Chile, in 1964. A brilliant and innovative thinker, he vanished nearly a decade later during Pinochet’s reign of terror. In his last letter to me he signed: Well, I’m tired now. And the bed is warm and nice. I’ll read another chapter in Capote’s In Cold Blood and then “…the black clouds of death will surround me for a while.” It was a loss and an awakening that still continues to inform me about both myself and the world.

The fourth turning point came in 1976–1977, when I ran a writing workshop in Green Haven Correctional Facility, where Sal Agron, Paul Simon’s “Capeman,” took a book of Rilke’s verse and kept it under his pillow after I’d read the poet’s “Eighth Elegy” aloud in English and German. It was a prison workshop with connections to Allen Ginsberg and Pete Seeger that would teach me about America’s brokenness and strengthen my lifelong commitment to writing.

I joined IBM Kingston in 1981 and have remained in technology ever since—first in marketing and then as an analyst. Turning point number five. My tech career has taught me how culture often trumps product in predicting a company’s success.

I fell in love with Audrey and married in 1986. We adopted two astonishing children, Melanie and Nathaniel, from the Philippines. I learn new lessons from my family about living and caring every day. Turning point number six.

A small Colorado press published a novel, BWLF, in 2012. My seventh turning point. And in fact, both Chile and Green Haven have inspired book-length manuscripts—a novel and a memoir—on my literary website www.dennisnils.com.

Now back to Yale. There is another manuscript, Dog: A Novel for Our Time, where Yale is largely the inspiration for Sarras College:

Sarras described itself as “a college dedicated to the creative sensibility.” This included a lot of science, genetics, farming and math as well as arts and humanities, along with a highly prized theater program. It reached out into the world with its slogan, “Civilization not Aristocracy,” and welcomed in many poor undergraduates with free tuition.

The narrator, a black Lab named Mendel, sets the stage, so I will end with this link to his introduction to a novel that, in its way, takes place at “Yale in New Hampshire.”