ABOUT DANIEL WEEKS
“Have faith and pursue the unknown end,” so advised Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had taken his own nostrum to heart and ended up on the U.S. Supreme Court. In one way or another, even before I’d heard of Holmes, I had been following a similar code, never quite knowing where I’d end up. (I still don’t!)
While the destination remains hazy, the starting point seems a bit more in focus. I think it happened in the fourth grade when my classmate Lauren described me as “creative” for an assignment on the use of adjectives. I’m not sure whether she really thought I was creative or just had to come up with something, but I do remember thinking it was an awful nice thing to say about someone.
The funny thing is, until she said the word, I had never thought of myself as creative in anyway, though I’d started to write poems a couple of years before and had been compiling my own encyclopedias on Ancient Greece and the Civil War. I had also begun to play the drums sometime in the third grade. But I recall thinking that “creative” was a descriptor well worth aspiring to. Since then, the idea has been a little light leading me on to that unknown end. The result: Hundreds of published poems; books of poetry, essays, and history, five albums of music, and thousands of gigs over more than forty years.