Meet David Blumenfeld | Retired philosophy professor, writer and poet

We had the good fortune of connecting with David Blumenfeld and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi David, why did you pursue a creative career?
When I was in my twenties pursuing a doctorate in philosophy in Berkeley in the 1960s, I also wrote children’s stories and poems. It began with my telling bedtime stories to my four-year-old son Danny when his mother, from whom I was divorced, sent him to visit me in the summers. I’d make up a story or a poem and later write it down, revising it as I went. Although I would have loved to continue writing children’s stories, the pressure of completing a philosophy degree and beginning a teaching career made it impossible. So, with great regret, I put my poems and stories into a paper folder (we had no personal computers back then — a computer in the university lab was the size of a small house) — and let it languish in a drawer, transporting it with me whenever I moved. Almost 60 years later, after I retired and began writing a memoir, I took out those old stories and poems — the paper now yellow — and started writing children’s literature again. I even revised a few of the sixty-year-old pieces and published them! Eventually, this evolved into my writing light verse for adults, and now, for the past couple of years, more serious or heavy-duty poetry. For me, this has all been a blessing. At 86, I’m working at least as hard at this late-life second career as I did at my old one, and I’m enjoying it tremendously.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I wouldn’t want to exaggerate my success because, even at my age, I consider myself a work in progress, someone still struggling to master a craft where there are many more accomplished practitioners than I am. What I am proud of, though, and what I hope will inspire others, is my having been able to return to a passion I once had and thought was extinguished forever, and ignited it again toward the end of my life. Perseverance and a determination to tell oneself that nothing is foreclosed is a large part of it. The rest is hard (but gratifying) work.

For anyone interested, here are links to readings of a couple of my children’s poems, one of my poems for adults, and one very personal story about my late wife’s and my 20-year struggle to find jobs near one another.

https://www.balloons-lit-journal.com/issue-13.html. (scroll down slightly to “And then He Was a Raindrop”)

https://betterthanstarbucks.wixsite.com/feb2022/better-than-fiction

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Over 86 years, there are a lot of people to thank, starting I suppose with my first-grade teacher, Kathryn Walsh of East Chicago, Indiana, who, because I was reading far ahead of grade level, tutored me every day after school in a variety of things including an entire high school biology book for a whole year causing my reading and analytic skills to take a quantum leap forward. She probably did as much for me (other than my mother) as any teacher or colleague since. And of course, I’d have to credit many of my undergraduate and graduate school professors, my late wife Jean (a philosopher, attorney, and circuit court clerk, who died at 49), and my present wife Paula Eubanks, professional artist, photographer, cook superiéure and a half dozen other wonderful things.

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