By Michael True, author of People Power

With Letters from the Country (1980), Carol Bly launched a writing career that continues to enrich American literary culture. Although mourning her recent death, at 77, devoted readers look forward to the publication of her only novel, Shelter Half, this spring.

A posthumous tribute to Bly in The Minneapolis Tribune referred to her as "Minnesota's Lioness of Letters," a writer of moral commitment, skill and courage. An early collection of stories, Backbone, indicated that she could appropriate those qualities to fiction as well as non-fiction; and sections of the novel appearing in literary journals suggest that her impressive talent sustained her to the end.

As managing editor of The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies, founded by her former husband, Robert Bly, she came to know many contemporary poets, so her papers and letters, housed at the University of Minnesota Library, are undoubtedly a treasure-trove of information about American writing in the post-modernist period.

Letter from the Country, a kind of 20th-century Walden, told people on the prairie, who "long for more expressiveness and freedom," how NOT to live lives of quiet desperation. Chapters on "To Be Rude and Hopeful Instead of Whining and Quitting," and "Growing Up Expressive," for example, offered concrete suggestions on how to become concerned, active citizens.

An early story, "The Mouse Roulette Wheel," is, for me, the best rendering of aesthetic and moral values that Carol Bly recommended in various books and pamphlets on writing. It's about a 41-year-old Episcopal curate's conflict with his brother, a former CIA agent, and a young parishioner, who protests a gambling table at the annual church fair: "The St. Matthew Vestry had little in common: like most vestries it was made up of rich men and poor men who were fortunately neither brave nor crazy, so they were able to carry on a nervous, lively conversation together," though they all liked the young curate.

On the morning of the church fair, Father Hewlitt faces two hard decisions and eventually sides with the protesters and closes down the mouse roulette wheel, then turns down an inheritance of a million dollars, because the money is tainted. In his Sunday sermon, he says that human beings making choices must often decide "Who's invisible in the scene? .... Even if we get paid just to change the towels every morning for an organization that is cruel, it still means ... we aren't keeping our invisible brother properly."

In Bad Government and Silly Literature (1986), Bly gave full rein to her genius as a pamphleteer, excoriating writers and readers of American fiction who, she argued, had lost their ethical awareness: "Our cadre of serious writers ... have emotions as citizens of the second cruelest government of our decade," but seldom "bring ethics-consciousness into our stories."

Grateful for her education at two "empire" schools (Adams/Andover Academy and Wellesley College), she took it as a personal insult that some classmates betrayed their aesthetic and ethical education, by becoming officials or apologists for the crimes of the CIA and National Security Agency. Such people, she argued, lacked insights available in recent theories of ethical and moral development, as well as aesthetics. "There is no resistance to psychology like the resistance of the rich," she added, since "they know that if they became aware of their own feelings they might well become aware of others' feelings."

A New Psychology for the Privileged Predator, one of four pamphlets she co-authored with Cynthia Loveland of the Midwest School Social Work Council, inevitably brings to mind George W. Bush (Andover/Yale), but the authors are more committed to altering curricula than to blaming individuals. Although business schools at Harvard and Stanford "offer handsome, really stunning syllabi in ethics, none of these we've seen, however, tells the story of which emotions corporate leaders feel when going along with the usual group avarice, and which emotions corporate leaders will likely feel if they raise their heads to give the dissenting opinion."

An earlier anthology, Changing the Bully Who Rules the World, gathered modern poems and prose by Thomas McGrath, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, etc., read within the context of Bly's commentary on "elegant ideas from recent work in the helping professions of psychotherapy and social work." Her years as a consultant to the Land Stewardship Project and American Farm project and as a well-known teacher of writing gave authority to her writing on those topics, also, in Small Towns: A Close Look at a Very Good Place and The Passionate, Accurate Story: Making Your Heart's Truth into Literature.

Bly's wide reading and an acute sensibility, as well as her elegance and wit, ask a good deal of her readers; her work is not for the faint-hearted. Occasionally "she shot herself in the foot," as a friend said, though Bly explained, without apology, why she may have sounded a bit shrill. "Gadflies are always looking out a chance to be shrill anyway, so I jumped at this one and have shouted my favorite hope: that we can educate children not to be problem-solvers but to be madly expressive all their lives,"

At her best, Carol Bly achieved the synthesis of aesthetic and ethical awareness that she admired in the fiction and nonfiction of Tolstoy and George Orwell. A preoccupation in whatever she wrote was her commitment to building community in the city as well as the country. Fittingly, donations in her memory will go to The Loft, the writing cooperative that helps to sustain a lively literary community in the Twin Cities. o