LidRobertHolland

I was born in East Hartland, Connecticut, on February 27th 1940, the year they finished building the dam at the Barkhamstead Reservoir. That same year my parents moved to Granby. At the time my Dad was a supervisor in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Then, when the U.S. entered the war, we moved to Hartford, and my Dad worked for Cushman Chuck. He was an engineer as well as a forester.
In 1944 we moved to Glastonbury, Connecticut, and my Dad changed companies, moving to Chandler Evens in West Hartford. I was four, and I was a busy kid, curious about everything and always sticking my nose where it didn't belong. It was about then, or so my Mother later told me, that I began telling stories. I'd stand on the footstool and start talking and making up the story as I went. I guess I did that quite a bit, but my parents, or at least so they said, enjoyed my tales.
If I was a talker, I was also a reader, and by the time I was in first grade, I could read all sorts of books and even got in trouble one day because I had a book (I don't remember which book) inside my reading primer, so I could read something interesting while the teacher taught the other kids how to read. She told me to stop reading in reading class, as I recall, and, of course, I argued with her, because I've never been very good at simply following orders unless I understood them. Seemed fair to me, but my teachers seemed to think that kids were supposed to do what they were told without asking why.
By then I had a younger brother and that was fine with me, because he took up a lot of my mother's time and that left me free to roam. In those days kids roamed a lot. During the summer, I'd take off after breakfast and head for the woods with a couple of my friends. We prowled the brooks and swamps and tore apart the old dumps behind the farms, checking out all the neat stuff.
And when my friends got bored, I made up games for us, pretending we were bear hunting or looking for swamp monsters. Some days we played baseball, all day. It's still my favorite game. When my brother Bill got old enough, he tagged along, and because he learned early on to keep his mouth shut and never complain, the other boys let him join in. He was tough as nails, and over the years, we've always gotten along and still hunt and fish together to this day, though that's more difficult to do on a regular basis because he now lives in Maine.
When I was 14 we moved to Hamden, Connecticut, because my Dad's job changed. I went to Cheshire Academy for a year because I didn't want to go to the high school in Hamden. I loved the Academy. It was all boys, and the masters made me work hard, but that was fine with me. I also began then to play sports more seriously, adding football and basketball to my list. So I was a pretty busy guy, and I even found time to act in a couple of plays that year.
But then we moved again, this time to Cheshire, Connecticut, and I wound up going to the high school. I was kind of a big kid, at six feet and 190 pounds, so sports occupied most of my time and kept me out of trouble. Both my brother and I were wild, but somehow we always seemed to stop before things got out of hand.
For the most part I had a good time growing up. My parents were patient, and they seemed to understand that both their sons needed a lot of room to grow. They stayed out of our way as long as we did the things we were supposed to, though there was never any real pressure about that. We'd been told, we knew what was expected, and they assumed we didn't need to be reminded. We did a lot of things as a family, and we had fun doing them. Dad taught us to fish and hunt, and he taught us to play cribbage and how to laugh, and more other things than I could possibly list.
Well, I guess I was pretty lucky. My Mother, who had grown up with two brothers, understood boys, and she made the rules for our behavior absolutely clear. But she never nagged us about them. Good thing. As a result we both had an enormous amount of respect for our parents.
I cannot tell you with any certainty why I became a writer. I did like to tell stories, and I liked to do things on my own. I've never had the least trouble disciplining myself to get up each day and go to work by myself. It's like having my own special machine that transports me to wherever I'd like to go. It’s called imagination. People talk about writers being talented, but I think fiction writers are driven by imagination and the excitement of seeing what that imagination, once unleashed, can produce.
The other things a writer must have are curiosity and an ability to actually see and understand what passes in front of one's eyes. That leads to asking questions, and the way we learn is to ask questions and then search for the answers. Most of the time that leads to asking better questions because the knowledge we gain helps us gain in focus and understanding.
I hear a lot of writers complain that it's hard work, and I suspect for writers of non-fiction, faced with mountains of facts that have to be assembled into readable order, that's true. But it has never been true for me, whether writing fiction or non-fiction, though I do find writing fiction a good deal more fun. That makes sense of course, because it goes back to that little boy standing on a footstool, telling stories and giving his imagination free rein.
Sometimes people ask me where I come up with my ideas and my answer is always the same. Stuff turns up when I need it. What provides the need is the act of making up a story and writing it down. The best part is that I never know ahead of time what my imagination will offer.
I graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in history and then went back for an unclassified year of graduate work in English and later did my masters degree in English at Trinity College in Hartford. I was a officer in the Navy, and I began writing seriously as an newspaper reporter. I also have worked as an editor, a newspaper columnist, and a stockbroker, and I taught journalism at the University of Connecticut and English at Eastern Connecticut State University and Nicolls College.
I served 12 years on the Woodstock, Connecticut, Board of Education, and I’ve served for another 14 years on the Board of Trustees of Woodstock Academy. My wife, Leslie, and I have lived in Woodstock for 29 years, and both our children, Morgan, our daughter, and Gardiner, our son, were born and grew up here.
I hunt and fish, play golf, play the guitar, do some woodworking, and I never stop poking my nose into things. I love knowing how things work and how they are made and how they can be made to work better. I also read ... a lot.
What this all comes down to is that I have fun.