“When I Was a Boy”

Susan Kay Anderson created “At Radio Central” from John Mills’ Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son (1922). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Susan Kay Anderson writes:

I looked at John Mills’ letters and chose interesting words and phrases. It seems like he wanted to disclose more than radio information to his son. As I read, I picked out words and phrases which spoke to me and wrote those down in an attempt to understand just what John Mills wanted to say. I’m not sure it is in this, but I could feel an explanation about war that has no explanation. As I read Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son, I could see how Mills leaves his project of wanting to speak to his son and just focuses on the science of radio technology. It was interesting to me how Mills seems to be entertaining himself, too, in these letters, and I looked for those words and phrases that illustrate this.

Also by Susan Kay Anderson at Heron Tree: “The Problem,” “Digression,” and “At Radio Central.”