On Mentors

The first poet I ever met

Hi, Friend.

I’ve been thinking about mentors, and one in particular is on my mind today.

One of my friends in elementary school was Dominic Citino—Dom, as we all called him. Dom was—and, I’m assuming, still is—kind and smart and very funny. I distinctly remember kicking a soccer ball around with some other friends in his backyard one afternoon. I remember there being homemade marinara sauce cooking on the stove, but I am suspicious of that too-neat detail. I don’t trust it. I may have made that up sometime in the last thirty something years.

At that time, my father worked at the phone company, my mother at a car dealership. The other adults I knew—relatives, neighbors, my friends’ parents—worked “regular jobs,” too. They were court stenographers, carpet store owners, administrative assistants, teachers, stay-at-home moms. Most of them had jobs I knew nothing about.

But Dom’s father, David Citino, was a poet.

David Citino taught at The Ohio State University for many years, beginning in 1974, and he was named poet laureate of the university. To this day, he’s the only poet to have been given that distinction at OSU. But he held another important distinction that is personal for me: He was the first person I knew who was a poet.

Dom and I lost touch after elementary school. We lived in different neighborhoods, and I was bussed to one middle school while he went to another. But years later, I met his father again. No backyard soccer ball this time, and no questionable pot of bubbling sauce. In 2000 I accepted a fellowship to attend the MFA program at The Ohio State University. My faculty advisor was David Citino. Over the next three years, he became a dear mentor and friend to me. I graduated from the program in the spring of 2003.

David Citino lived with multiple sclerosis for many years until his death in 2005, from complications from the disease. The next time I saw his son Dom in person, from a distance, was at his father’s memorial service. The Fawcett Center at OSU was standing room only.

David was a brilliant poet and a warm, generous teacher. He was also the only person who called me by my first and middle name in public—the only person I ever allowed to do that, happily, without correcting him. I remember him announcing I’d won a creative writing prize, calling me up to accept the award: Maggie Jo.

It was an endearment, I knew, because words matter. Because history matters. It was his way of calling me family.

I was thinking about David today, seemingly out of the blue, and then I realized: it’s his birthday today. He would have been 77.

Happy Birthday, David. Thank you.

Love,
Maggie Jo