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KAREN BARTA: Good morning. I'm Karen Barta with news from Minnesota Public Radio. The Minnesota Supreme Court hears arguments today on whether the state's cap on funding for public defenders violates the Constitution. Hennepin County Chief Public Defender Bill Kennedy filed suit saying poor people are deprived of a good defense because public defenders are overworked. The FM news station's Elizabeth Stawicki reports.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Kennedy says public defenders can only spend minimal contact with clients, do little or no investigation of cases, and are more likely to plea bargain because they're so overworked. But attorneys for the state say there's no evidence the public defender's office is violating or about to violate a client's constitutional rights. They say the public defender's office provides excellent representation despite heavy caseloads. It suggests the State Board of public defenders work with the legislature to get more funding. But Kennedy says there's no indication the legislature will adequately fund the public defender system because it's under no obligation to do so. For the FM news station, I'm Elizabeth Stawicki.

KAREN BARTA: A published report says conservative estimates suggest that the problem of social gambling cost Minnesotans more than $200 million per year. That's in taxes, lost income, bad debts and crime. Two surveys last year estimated that more than 100,000 people have experienced significant problems.

The state forecast today becoming windy, there's a chance of snow developing in Central and Northern Minnesota. Highs from the 20s in the Northeast to middle 40s in the Southwest, for the Twin Cities becoming cloudy and windy with a chance for snow, possibly mixed with rain or sleet this afternoon, a high near 35.

It's cloudy around the region at 17 degrees in Duluth, 24 in Rochester, 20 in Saint Cloud, and 23 in the Twin Cities. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Barta.

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PAULA SCHROEDER: It's six minutes now past 10 o'clock. You're listening to Midmorning on the FM news station. I'm Paula Schroeder. Coming up, we are going to hear from Joe Dowling.

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The new artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis balanced being a student and an actor in Dublin by feigning a sore throat when final exam time rolled around. Today on Midmorning on our Voices of Minnesota interview, we hear from Joe Dowling.

The 47-year-old native of Ireland has a three-year contract as the Guthrie's sixth artistic director. Dowling succeeds Garland Wright in the post. The 31-year-old Guthrie Theater was founded by Sir Tyrone Guthrie. His mission was to create a resident acting troupe to perform the classics.

Classics, by Guthrie's definition, were plays which have stood the test of time. Joe Dowling isn't talking about what plays will be announced in April for the theater's new season, but he says his definition of classic includes new works by living playwrights.

A few days ago, Dowling sat in the library at the Guthrie Theater to talk with the FM news station's Euan Kerr. Even as a child, Dowling said, he spoke his mind about what he saw on the stage.

JOE DOWLING: There's a great family story about my earliest memory of theater that my mother tells on family occasions. As you know, one of the great traditions in our islands is the Christmas pantomime, where children are taken to the story of Cinderella or the story of Puss in Boots or the story of Aladdin or whatever it may be. And the villain is always a very dark villain, and the goodies are always very good. And black is black and white is white, and never the twain shall meet in these pantomimes.

And the first, as I say, memory that there is of me in theater is of me sitting on my mother's knee at about the age of three or four watching this pantomime. And every time the villain came on and would do in his melodramatic way a kind of a hiss at the audience and so on, I would burst into tears and cry at the idea of this villain.

And my mother, in order to try and placate me, looked at the program that was on her lap and said, it's all right, it's just an actor. Mr. Fitzgerald is his name. And at the top of my voice, and I was always wanting to be able to speak clearly and articulately, I said very loudly, well, I don't like Mr. Fitzgerald, which, of course, Mr. Fitzgerald heard from the stage and collapsed into a hilarious laughter and had to leave the stage.

So even at a very early stage, those directorial instincts were coming out of me. And I was giving a sort of a criticism of his performance. But I don't have that memory. That's a memory that's been imposed on me.

My first memory also is, though, of pantomime is going to see a great Irish comedian called Jimmy O'Dea. And he had a sidekick who was called Maureen Potter, and both of them were the mainstay of Irish entertainment for many, many years.

And as a small child, that's where I fell in love with theater. I fell in love with the spectacle. I fell in love with the magic of going to these Christmas shows and seeing the fairies with their wands, and the villains and the comedy.

And I had the most extraordinary pleasure in later life of both working with and becoming a friend of Maureen Potter, who's still one of Ireland's greatest actors and comedians.

And so the circle was completed when, in fact, I worked with her many years later because she had been largely instrumental in instilling a love of theater in me, even though I thought that she and Jimmy O'Dea were gods that had come from the heavens to bless us.

So from that age, from the age of six or seven, I had no doubts in my mind as to what I wanted to spend my life doing. And I have never done anything else. [CHUCKLES]

EUAN KERR: We all have dreams, but not many of us actually have the opportunity to have them fulfilled, as you have. Was it an easy process for you to convert that dream into reality?

JOE DOWLING: No, I don't think it was an easy process. I think that there was a kind of a determination and relentlessness about me that was nobody was going to get in the way. But I don't think it was easy.

I made the decision at a very early age. And I started to go to drama classes when I was six or seven, encouraged by a grandmother who really had a starstruck quality. She liked the idea of somebody being interested in drama. And I went along, and I was determined.

Then when I left high school at the age of 18, I was determined I was going to go to the abbey and get into the abbey. And I did. But I also wanted to go to university because I felt that this was something that certainly my mother was very keen on.

My father died when I was very young. He died when I was eight, which meant that there was an enormous hardship in our family because my mother raised five children on her own. And it was a very difficult task.

So it was very difficult to make a decision to go into something like theater, which was going to have that kind of insecurity attached to it, and particularly when there were difficulties at home.

But in fairness, my mother was extraordinarily supportive. Supportive to the point where she said, well, it's your life and you've got to do with it what you wish, and didn't stand in any way.

The difficulties then, of course, came in trying to combine a university education with a theatrical career. But I suppose I'm one of the few people in the world who actually paid for their university career by working as an actor. Most people spend a great deal of time in university trying to get experience. But I actually was a member of the abbey company all the time I was in university.

The university authorities didn't know that I was in the abbey, and the abbey authorities didn't know I was in the university. And the terrible danger that I had was that some of my professors might be theater conscious and go to the theater, and they might see me on stage. They didn't. They had no interest in theater whatsoever, which was a kind of a reflection to some extent on the English department of UCD at the time, University College Dublin.

But the fact of the matter is that I managed to lead a very extraordinary double life. And I would be in the abbey and rehearsing, and then I'd race up and go to a lecture, and then I'd race back down and do a performance, and I'd race back up to the university.

And at certain points of the year, when we'd come to exam time, I would find myself with a very bad cold and a flu and terrible sore throat and therefore have to not be able to be at rehearsal. In fact, I'd be in the university doing exams.

So it was an extraordinary double life, but I did actually get through it. And I got to a point where I had a university degree and was also a fully fledged member of the abbey company.

EUAN KERR: There's a very popular image of the abbey as being a place that is famous for its productions, but also really is famous for its links with the great writers. It must have been tremendously exciting to plug yourself into that and feel that wafting over you as you were racing up and down the hill to your lectures.

JOE DOWLING: I can't describe the excitement of the first time I was accepted into the abbey theater. Its foundation, it was at a time of political change in Ireland, came about because at the beginning part of this century, the Irish decided that the only way that we were going to identify ourselves as a nation was not simply to have political change and a change of parliaments, but also a recognition of what was distinctly Irish about us, what made us different from being English and the Irish language, the Irish literature. And WB Yeats and John Millington Synge and Lady Gregory came together, and this thing was born, which was much more than a simple expression of theatrical quality. It was much more about nationhood. It was about the importance of who we were as a people.

And for all that the abbey has had many ups and downs and had many crises in its time, that still is what it reflects. It reflects a real sense of being Irish and what it is to be Irish. And it has done that through the creation of new dramatic literature in its 90-year history. That's what its function has been.

Ireland, even as we speak, is changing day by day. Every time I go back there, I'm aware that the changes are profound, the painful changes for a lot of people. Because we're changing from being a very, very authoritarian, very rigidly Catholic country to being a much more pluralistic country, to being a country which is both at the heart of the European experience, and at the same time, on its fringes.

That's very difficult. The transition from the kind of Ireland that I grew up in to the Ireland that's there for my children now. It's a painful change we're going through at the moment through a divorce referendum, which is raising all kinds of issues and all kinds of ghosts that many people would wish weren't raised, but of course, which have to be raised if the society is to change.

Now, the abbey, with the tradition that it has, the tradition of writing and the tradition of a different, more peasant world, it found itself and has had to catch up with the modern world. That change, also in the life of an institution, can be fascinating. I was part of that change in the '60s and '70s and '80s, but I've seen it accelerated more since I left.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Joe Dowling talking with the FM news station's Euan Kerr, he's the new artistic director at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. We'll continue our conversation with Joe Dowling in just a moment. You're listening to Voices of Minnesota, a regular feature on Monday as part of Midmorning. I'm Paula Schroeder. It's 10:16.

And in the weather today, we are expecting some snow to develop in Central and Northern Minnesota, with a mixture of snow, sleet and rain possible in the south during the afternoon.

It's going to become windy as well with winds out of the northwest at 20 to 30 miles per hour. Look for high temperatures from the 20s around the Duluth area to the middle 40s in Sioux Falls. In the Twin Cities, the high today should be around 35 degrees, with winds increasing to 20 to 30 miles per hour this afternoon. Now here's more of Euan Kerr's interview with Joe Dowling.

EUAN KERR: Looking at the experience, which you're going to have here, I wonder if you see parallels with the Guthrie in that you're dealing with a fairly similar geographic area, similar population, although without perhaps that deeply rooted tradition. And are there parallels?

JOE DOWLING: I think there are great parallels. I think the reason why Guthrie chose this community was not an accident. I think the reason why Guthrie and Zeisler and Oliver Ray chose this community was because they recognized that within this community, there was a real hunger and a need and a desire for something which was a pursuit of excellence for its own sake and also a reflection of what the cultural values of this community were.

And yes, there is not the same length of tradition. It's 35 years, as opposed to 90. But there has also been built up over the many years of the Guthrie, a loyal following and an understanding of the need of theater to constantly expand and to break barriers and to be different. That, I think, also creates a certain kind of tension and a certain kind of conflict in the same way that I think the abbey is suffering from being a theater, which respects tradition but still has to reflect the contemporary world.

I think the same is true of the Guthrie. The Guthrie has to respect the tradition that it is a classic theater, a theater really brought into being in order to make accessible those classics of the past that are, to a large extent, European classics. That's the nature of Guthrie and the world that he brought here. And the stage that he created here was to provide a proper forum for Shakespeare and for those sort of plays.

And at the same time, the world has moved on a great deal since 1963 in terms of our understanding of the diversity that's required in cultural terms. And the Guthrie has to reflect that.

The Guthrie also has to reflect a huge change in acting styles that has happened since 1963, and adapt its work and its stage to what an audience will accept and will become part of its tradition in the future. So I think there are great parallels about the kind of changes that the Guthrie needs to go through and is going through even as we speak.

And I think you're right about the geographical spread. What's interested me is that since coming here and finding out a bit about the Guthrie is that it is not simply the people of the Twin Cities that actually use the Guthrie. It is the state of Minnesota. It is beyond the state of Minnesota.

Because I was saying this recently at an event about the state, and someone said to me, you really should talk about the area because in fact, people come from Wisconsin, they come from Dakota, they come from all sorts of places. And that's true. And they come down from Canada, from Winnipeg and so on.

And so that feeling that it reflects a center of excellence in a place where geographically people can travel to, gives it a kind of responsibility that I think probably few other cultural institutions in the region have. And I think that that sense of tradition, combined with the feeling that we need to move forward and find new things and new ways of doing things, makes it an exciting place, just as I think the abbey is finding and indeed many other theaters are finding change is always exciting. It can be dangerous, it can be fearful, but it ultimately is always an exciting process.

EUAN KERR: What kind of change can we expect under Joe Dowling at the Guthrie?

JOE DOWLING: Well, it will be evolution rather than revolution. It will be a time of change that will come slowly, but rather than be forced upon it. I don't see myself as a brand new broom coming in and sweeping clean. I think that the organization is a very solid organization. The kind of audience that we have have expectations, and I would hope to build on those things rather than to replace what's there at present.

I'm very interested in new work. It's been one of the areas of my life that's been most fascinating to me is to work, as I did for many years at the abbey and indeed in other places, with writers. And I'm very anxious that we would have a direct and open relationship with new writing. That's not something that the Guthrie has done in the past. It's always seen itself as a theater of the classics.

I believe that unless we start to develop the classics of tomorrow, we simply will run out of plays or that the future generations will not tell our story in the way that we are telling the stories of the past. So one of my key priorities over the next few years is to develop an ongoing relationship with living writers.

I'm also very keen on the notion of training, of training a company. We have a relationship, a good relationship here with the University of Minnesota. And it's a relationship I want to continue and develop because these plays that the Guthrie largely do, the classics, require a certain kind of training. They require a certain kind of approach, that in many of the training programs in the country, not the one here, I understand, but in many of the training programs, it just isn't happening. People are being trained much more now for television and film than they are for the classic stage. And we have a classic stage. We have to therefore encourage that people know how to use it and know how to use their voices and so on. I'm for it.

I take a very wide view of the word "classics." I believe it to be a term that very often is taken to mean dry, dusty old plays from the Jacobian age. I would see plays from the '60s and '70s and '80s being classics in their own time. And I would see us probably moving more in that direction as time goes on, that the plays done here are not all plays of a former age, but that they would have a contemporary feel to them as well.

EUAN KERR: Let me ask you about the relationship between America and the theater at the moment. It seems to me that while there is some incredible work being done across the country, there's a problem with audiences. Part of that problem may be due to a perception of, and I'm going to use all sorts of nasty words here, inaccessibility, elitism, expense, all these things. And these are charges that have occasionally been leveled at this theater. How do you get over this issue? Whether it's perception or reality, it's out there. What does the theater have to do to start drawing people away from their televisions, perhaps even away from the big Broadway shows that are packing them in downtown? What's the strategy?

JOE DOWLING: Well, one wishes, one had a magic wand and could wave it and find a strategy that would immediately ensure that every season, every performance is full.

First of all, let's take expense. Expense is a perception rather than a reality. There are many, many ways in which people can come to the theater for less than an arm and a leg. And this theater, it seems to me, looking at the history of it and at the present reality of it, have provided tremendous amount of opportunities for young people, for people on the rush line, for discounts of one sort or another, that have allowed people to come at a price that is relatively affordable.

Of course, there will be certain shows and certain times when people want to go and that the price will be higher than others. But there is and there have been ways, I think, affected. And this theater has been extraordinarily open in its approach to young people, to groups and to the way in which they bring in and develop relationships with different kinds of audiences.

The accessibility, I would go along with a worry about that. One of the things that I think is terribly important is that people, when they come to the theater, feel absolutely that it is an accessible place from the moment they decide to pick up the telephone to the moment they leave.

As far as the plays are concerned, I don't believe a play should be done unless it has a point of contact with an audience. I don't believe that the classics or revivals should simply be done because somebody wants to do them. I think that you have to make certain that the classics that survive their own time must speak directly to ours.

And that certainly will be a criterion that I'll be applying to the choice of plays. It must be something that I feel people, not just an intellectual view or not just an elitist group, but that a general audience, who would be just as happy going to see the Broadway shows, should feel just as happy coming in here because they know they're going to have a good night and they're going to have a good experience. It may be a slightly different experience, but it's going to be just as good and as entertaining.

It's a dirty word sometimes in theater circles, that word "entertainment." We in the theater tend to talk to each other more than we do to the public. We like the feeling that we're avant garde and we're experimental and we're different. And we, therefore, like the notion that people in other theaters will think well of us. I'm much more interested in what the people who come in through the door think of us than what the theater profession around the country think.

And so even in the short time I've been here, I've been out and about and talking to a lot of people and will continue to do that, to gauge a sense of what this community expects of the Guthrie. And I'm getting that sense.

When I say that there are times when people in theater talk of entertainment as though they had tongues and they were lifting up the word and holding it away from them, I don't. I believe that if I go to the theater, I want to be entertained. I also want to be stimulated. I don't want to go to the theater simply to see dancing girls, though occasionally dancing girls are very nice. But I do want to go to have some sort of emotional contact with what I see on the stage.

And I think that's the key to what takes them away from television and takes them away from the World Wide Web and all these various other distractions that are available to people nowadays. I think it is an emotional contact.

I have a great memory of going to see Death of a Salesman in New York, with Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich, some years ago. And there was a man, there were a group of people behind me, and clearly they were people who didn't normally go to the theater. They were going because it was Dustin Hoffman, because their talk was quite clearly not regular theatergoers.

And this man, who had spent a great deal of the night passing the chocolate box down to his friends that he had brought to the theater and talking aloud and his wife tried to stop him. It came to the scene in the play, and if you know the play, where Biff and the father finally confront one another and he says, you're not a dime a dozen. You are my son. You are not a dime a dozen. I'm Willy Loman's son. And the moment of truth between father and son is a very powerful moment in dramatic literature. It's one of the, to my mind, one of the great scenes of 20th century writing.

And as the scene went on, I suddenly heard this extraordinary sound behind me. It was like a terrible deep sobbing, and everybody was looking around. And this man, who had been really vocal and really seeming on top of the experience, sat there and the tears streamed down his face. And somewhere that play had touched him at a level that he didn't even know existed. And that sobbing went on right through to the end of the play, which was about 20 minutes later.

And as we all left the theater, he and his wife sat, and he couldn't move from the seat. Now, that's fairly dramatic, and I don't expect everybody who goes to the theater to have that profound an effect on them.

But somewhere along the line, the capacity of theater to move, to shape people's thinking, to make people feel either that some experience they've been through, it has a healing effect or it has the effect of making them think deeper about their own lives. That's what I think makes theater unique. And that's what I think makes--

If we can do that and do that in a way that makes people feel good, I think we will get them back into the theater. And I think that the sort of fear that there is that we've lost this generation of theater goers, I think it will change because it is a deeply spiritual experience. I use that word in an advise sense. I don't mean it in any kind of overtly religious sense, but it gets in touch with your spirit, whether it be the comic spirit or the tragic spirit. And if it does that, then it succeeds.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Joe Dowling is the new artistic director of the Guthrie Theater. He talked with the FM news station's Euan Kerr. Our Voices of Minnesota interview series is produced by Dan Olson.

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It's 10:30. You're listening to Midmorning on the FM news station. Minnesota Public Radio operates an association with these institutions. Saint John's Abbey and University in Collegeville, Concordia College in Moorhead, Luther College, Decorah, the College of Saint Scholastica in Duluth, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, and the College of Saint Benedict in Saint Joseph.

It's coming up on 29 minutes before 11 o'clock. Karen Barta is here with an update on the news. And Karen, there has been a ruling on abortion in the Supreme Court.

KAREN BARTA: Paula, the High Court has rejected Colorado's ban on Medicaid-funded abortions for victims of rape or incest. The High Court today let stand a lower court ruling that forces states in the Medicaid program to pay for such abortions.

NATO experts have arrived in Bosnia and Croatia, there to lay the groundwork for the Bosnian peacekeeping mission by a 60,000-member NATO force. That force ultimately will include 20,000 Americans. Midmorning will broadcast a report about the US troops sent to Bosnia, coming up after the news.

Ballots are being mailed around the state today to approximately 800 union workers with Burlington Northern Railroad. Members of the Transportation Communication Union, or TCU, will vote up or down on a master agreement covering the transfer of mostly clerical positions out of Minnesota. TCU Senior Vice General Chairman Kim Cornell says, the proposed transfers are the direct result of the recent merger between BN and the Santa Fe Railroad.

KIM CORNELL: When transfers are to be made and work transfers, they serve us an advanced 45-day written notice. It tells us which employees are affected, where the work is going. And from that, then those employees, if under the agreement that's out for ratification, will have their options to follow that work. And it will explain to them what rights and obligations they have if they desire not to move.

KAREN BARTA: Ballots must be returned by December 18. The vote will be counted the next day.

The state forecast today, becoming windy, there is a chance of snow developing in Central and Northern Minnesota, a mixture of snow, sleet and rain possible in the South this afternoon.

Highs from the 20s in the north to middle 40s in the far southwest. For the Twin Cities, there is a chance for snow this afternoon, possibly mixed with rain or sleet and a high near 35.

It's cloudy around the region. In Rochester, the current temperature is 24. Duluth is reporting 17 degrees. It's 20 in Saint Cloud and 23 in the Twin Cities. Paula, that's a news update from Minnesota Public Radio.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Thanks, Karen. 27 minutes before 11 o'clock. I'm Paula Schroeder, and this is Midmorning on the FM news station. Thanks for joining us today.

Well, the first American forces participating in the NATO mission in Bosnia are on their way to the northeastern town of Tuzla. Their immediate assignment is to set up a logistics and communications headquarters. Many of the British and French troops that will be part of the 60,000-member NATO force are already in Bosnia as part of the ongoing UN peacekeeping mission.

They've been witnessing strong opposition to the new Bosnia peace agreement, not only among Bosnian Serbs, but among Croats as well. National Public Radio's Richard Carruthers reports.

PROTESTER: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

RICHARD CARRUTHERS: Standing in a muddy Zagreb Park on a cold afternoon, the protesters chanted treason and applauded speakers who said they were the victims of the greatest political manipulation.

The leader of an opposition party said the Croatian president, who initialed the Dayton Agreement, was a traitor. We won't give peace, he said, to those who surrendered us, sold us and betrayed us.

One of those among the crowd was a Bosnian Croat refugee from the Northeastern town of Doboj that will remain under Serb control in the peace agreement. She says the only prospects for her family now is life in a Croatian refugee camp.

REFUGEE: There is no justice here. We feel betrayed. Basically, we are finished, and we never believed we would see something like that happen. And we will protest every day. And this agreement must be annulled completely.

RICHARD CARRUTHERS: These words coming from a Croatian woman could equally have come from a separatist Serb around Sarajevo. They have held three protest rallies in the last week against the Dayton accord, which calls on them to surrender suburbs to the control of the Muslim-led government.

The US administration is more concerned about the Serb reaction, especially after the Bosnian Serb military leader, General Ratko Mladic, rejected the peace agreement over the weekend. General Mladic told a gathering of his troops that Serbs could never agree to the map on the Division of Bosnia that was agreed in Dayton because he said they would lose control of territories where Serbs have lived for centuries. Too much blood has been spilled and too many lives lost, he said. Mladic called on the soldiers to defend the borders of the so-called Serbian Republic in Bosnia, particularly the suburbs of Sarajevo.

His opposition to the accord indicates deep divisions in the Serb leadership and questions the ability of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to deliver the Bosnian Serbs. If he cannot, NATO forces could well run into conflict with Serb troops.

French soldiers who will police the Dayton Agreement around Sarajevo are already nervous about its chances of success. Their commander, General Jean Renee Bachelet, accused the United States of cynically pushing through a hasty plan to promote President Clinton's re-election. As a result, he said, French soldiers would be left directing traffic while Sarajevo burns.

Although he later retracted his statements, the French government has recalled him to France, saying criticism of the Dayton accord will not be tolerated, especially, cynics might say, as the grand peace ceremony will be signed in Paris.

So the outlook is still uncertain for the NATO mission, although President Clinton formally authorized the first American troops to leave for Bosnia over the weekend. He said, 700 soldiers will join an advance deployment to set up a logistics and communications headquarters in North East Bosnia. The full 60,000-strong NATO force is due to arrive shortly after the signing of the treaty later this month. For National Public Radio, this is Richard Carruthers in Zagreb.

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PAULA SCHROEDER: Of course, the greatest fear for the families of the troops being sent to Bosnia is that their loved one won't return. President Clinton and military strategists have acknowledged there will be casualties, and it's possible that some children may lose a parent.

Dr. Maxine Harris has studied the effects of the early loss of a parent on a child's life and outlines them in her book, The Loss that is Forever. She's a clinical psychologist in the Washington, DC area and says, she was led to the topic by her work with patients.

MAXINE HARRIS: I'm a clinical psychologist, and I'm always trying to figure out how we become who we are. That's really the big question. How do we turn into the people we are as adults? And one of the things that had really jumped out at me over the years was that when people had experienced the early death of a mother or father, that really became the important event of their lives. Everything else was played out against that as a backdrop.

So I think I really started with wanting to understand this. And of course, as is always true, when you decide to do something like this, it just pops up everywhere.

And of course, I remembered, my mother had lost her dad when she was a girl. And I had always known that growing up. And my husband lost his dad. So the people closest to me in the world had lived through this.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Did you ever know how it affected them or was it just a fact of their life?

MAXINE HARRIS: Well, with my mother, I knew that she was always wary of leavetakings, that she had, I think, a kind of lurking nervousness about being abandoned. And quite honestly, I think that she inadvertently passed that along to her children, that you just better be careful because the people you love can leave.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah, don't get too attached.

MAXINE HARRIS: Well, and keep something in reserve just in case.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Tell us about children and why this is such, as you say in the book, a catastrophic event in their lives, if they do lose a parent at a young age.

MAXINE HARRIS: Well, a child's world is so small. Even when we try to involve our kids with other kids and play school and all the rest of that, for them, we are the center of their universe. And I think that's really the way you have to think about it. The center falls out, and it feels like a catastrophe. The child not only experiences the emotional loss, but all of the stability, the security, everything that you count on in order to grow up safely seems as if it's vanished.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You account many different kinds of deaths that children experience. And some of them experience a death of a parent before they are even aware of it. Some of them could be infants. Yet that is still a loss for them. Tell us about that.

MAXINE HARRIS: What people told me is when a parent died, maybe a woman was pregnant, a man was off at war, he was killed, the child never knew the father, there wasn't a loss in the sense of losing a relationship. But there was this pervasive sense of absence, something missing, something undefinable that wasn't there, that you often found yourself longing for.

One of the things also that's true about children is that they don't really develop a concept of death and its permanence until they're about seven years old, which is really kind of mind-boggling because a number of the people I interviewed had lost a parent, three, four, five years of age, but kids that young still think that death is a reversible state.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yes. Well, in fact, I've heard kids say, well, grandma is going to come back from heaven, things like that, and truly believe it.

MAXINE HARRIS: Well, they think heaven is a place and you go there, and you take the train back.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah.

MAXINE HARRIS: Well, in fact--

PAULA SCHROEDER: One of the most compelling stories, I think-- the most compelling stories are those of children who are told that their parent has gone away on a long trip or something. And even some children who are not allowed to talk about it at all. And you found a number of cases like that.

MAXINE HARRIS: I did. There were lots of people who, after the death happened, the parents' name almost became taboo within the house. People wouldn't mention the mom or dad who was gone. And if they did, it was in hushed secret whispers. And the child was left feeling that it wasn't acceptable to talk about what had happened. It wasn't acceptable to ask questions. So that there was this veil of secrecy on top of the experience of loss.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It seems almost cruel. Well, it does seem cruel to not tell a child that his or her mother has died and won't be coming back and how she died. Or if it's the father, of course, how he died. But a lot of people do that with the thought that they're protecting the child from something.

MAXINE HARRIS: I think these really are well-meaning attempts. People don't know how to explain it to a child. They don't know what words to use. They don't want to cause the child distress. And they think at least, that it will be better for the child not to know.

One of the things that people told me consistently is that they wanted information. They wished that they had been told. Even if they might not have understood as children, as young children, as they grew, they would at least be able to check things out. Cancer is something, for example, it's hard to understand when you're four years old. But by the time you're 10 years old, that word has meaning.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's very interesting to me, too, to read about the young men in particular who lost fathers when they were teenagers and the impact that that had on their lives and also their relationships with their mothers.

MAXINE HARRIS: There were some wonderful stories that people told me, actually, where fathers died. It was a tragic loss, but mothers actually rose to the occasion. And their recollections of their mothers and their mothers' competence and their mothers' strength are really told almost with awe and deep respect. And I think these were men who actually grew up believing that women were very competent and very special.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Suicide is a particularly difficult situation for children to deal with because you talk about the shame and the guilt associated with that.

MAXINE HARRIS: Probably the saddest stories that I heard were stories where a parent had committed suicide. I think suicide is not only hard for children, it's hard for all of us, for all family members. How do you explain someone choosing to die? It's really incomprehensible.

And even though we now know more about depression and despair than we did 20 or 30 years ago, it still is almost unbearable, especially, I think, for a young person to think that a mother or a father chose to leave.

The people who experienced the suicide of a parent often had great difficulty feeling good about themselves. I think self-worth was really profoundly attacked. You felt that you just must not be very good if your dad chose to kill himself.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah. So they would say, if I was really lovable, then my father would have stayed alive.

MAXINE HARRIS: And I think you said exactly the right word, lovable. People felt somehow that they had a fatal flaw and they were not lovable as human beings. Otherwise, the death wouldn't have happened.

PAULA SCHROEDER: We're talking with Maxine Harris, whose book, The Loss that is Forever, tells about the lifelong impact of the early death of a mother or father.

Tell us about the other parent who was left to take care of the children they often went through. Well, they do go through a variety of different characters depending on each individual person.

MAXINE HARRIS: Well, nobody is more important to the child than the surviving parent. All of a sudden, all of your needs, all of your concerns shift to just one person. Unfortunately, that person has just sustained a major loss. So it's hard for them. They may be depressed. They may be angry. They may be cranky. A child doesn't understand that, and often spends a lot of energy trying to take care of that surviving parent who is just mourning. But a child doesn't understand what that means.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Sometimes that remaining parent can even become abusive or neglectful, which I would think would bring up even more feelings of guilt and shame and worthlessness in the child.

MAXINE HARRIS: And a double sense of loss. There were people whose surviving parents became so depressed that they withdrew and really neglected the child. And then the child feels not only abandoned by the parent who died, but abandoned by the surviving parent who is no longer him or herself.

PAULA SCHROEDER: What are some of the things that parents did that worked, the surviving parents, to raise a healthy child?

MAXINE HARRIS: I think the best thing a surviving parent can do is to get support from friends, from family members who are your peers. You will share certain aspects of your loss with your children, but they should not be the main source of support for you.

And I think that when surviving parents were able to be cared for and supported by others, then they were freer to give more to their children.

PAULA SCHROEDER: These were all adults that you interviewed. Was there a generational difference? Because I know that the people you interviewed ranged in age from their 20s up into their 60s.

MAXINE HARRIS: What I was interested in is how this early experience impacts your life for the rest of your life. So I wanted to see how people formed relationships, how they raised their own kids, how they dealt with issues of illness and mortality.

And I consequently wanted to interview people who were really in mid-life. And each time a person had to deal with a new transition, a sort of new milestone, the issue of the early loss came up again.

When you fell in love and you were about to commit yourself to someone, you would think, oh my goodness, will I lose this person? When you had children of your own, you would think, can I be a parent? Do I have a role model? What if I die and leave another generation of children without a parent? So that each time you had to confront something across the lifespan, part of what you thought about was the death of your parent.

PAULA SCHROEDER: How does this differ from children who are born into single parent households, who might not have a father present? Is that different from the death of a parent?

MAXINE HARRIS: I think it is, because what you have when there is a death is catastrophe changed the world. And that's how it's registered for a child. It's not this is the way it is, this is the way it always was. Or in a case of a divorce, there's often ongoing contact with both parents. There are possibilities of reunions and get-togethers. This is a sense of permanent change and change that you don't feel is for the better.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Any advice for people who are dealing with children who have lost a parent? Should you be very open with them and honest about what has happened?

MAXINE HARRIS: I think you should give them information. I think you should word things in a way that children can understand.

One woman who was experiencing cancer said to a little girl, you know how it feels when you're playing and you're running all over and everything's out of control? Well, cancer is like when the cells inside your body get like that. Now, that was an explanation tailored for a child, and the child was able to understand that. So I think you want to give children information that they can take in.

I think you need to also remember that children often have difficulty with strong emotions, and they don't necessarily sit down and tell you how they feel. They may go outside and run around. They may kick the back door. You need to let children deal with feelings in their own way and in their own time.

It's also very important to keep things around the house that will help a child remember a parent. One man told me that as a boy, he used to go into his mother's closet after she died, and just smell the clothes. And he felt tremendously comforted and safe being able to do that. Sometimes we want to just remove all traces of someone who's died. And I think that's not healthy for children.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You mentioned too, Arthur Ashe in particular, and at the end of his autobiography that was published posthumously, he writes a letter to his daughter. And you call that a real gift to her, of him almost being there for her even after his death.

MAXINE HARRIS: His letter is just a wonderful example of a parent, being a good parent to the very end. And I actually worked with a young woman, who was dying of cancer, who did something similar. She wrote for each of her children, the story of their birth and what it meant to her to give birth to each of them individually.

And she also wrote her motherly advice. And these letters were to be put away and given to them when they were old enough to read them and also when they asked for them. But each letter was written separately to an individual child. And it was really just a beautiful and courageous act on her part as she was dying.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah, indeed a great gift from a parent. Maxine Harris, I want to thank you so much for talking with us today.

MAXINE HARRIS: Thank you.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Maxine Harris is a clinical psychologist in Washington, DC, and the author of The Loss That is Forever, The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father. It's published by Dutton.

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It's seven minutes now before 11 o'clock. You're listening to Midmorning on the FM news station. It's going to be a pretty wintry week around the state of Minnesota. It's going to become windy today, with a chance of snow developing in the central and northern part of the state. In the south, look for a mixture of snow, sleet and rain. And we're going to have highs today from the 20s in the northeast to the middle 40s in the far southwest. Even colder tomorrow, look for a high in the Twin Cities, around 33 degrees.

Well, coming up at noon today, you can hear a speech by Sharon Pratt Kelly, who is the former mayor of Washington, DC This was a speech she delivered at the College of Saint Catherine's Women in Leadership Forum. That's at noon today as part of Midday.

And, of course, Gary Eichten will have all the latest news and weather at 11 o'clock here on the FM news station. We're going to find out about developments in the effort to get pro-hockey in downtown Saint Paul, among other things. First, we're going to hear from Garrison Keillor.

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GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is the Writer's Almanac for Monday. It's the 4th of December, 1990. It's on or about this day that the great Norway spruce at Rockefeller Center is lit up for Christmas.

It's the birthday of Thomas Carlyle, born in the lowlands of Scotland on this day in 1795. Author of Sartor Resartus, also author of A History of the French Revolution, he'd finished writing the first volume of the book and gave it to his friend, John Stuart Mill, who left it in his living room, and whose housemaid used it to start a fire with. Carlisle didn't tell Mill that it was his only copy. He just sat down and rewrote it.

It was on this day in 1867, the National Grange was formed. It was the first general farm organization in the country. 1872, on this date, a great mystery of the seas, the American ship, the Maria Celeste, was found adrift, abandoned in the Atlantic off the Coast of Portugal. The lifeboat was not on board. The cargo had not been touched. The captain's table was set for a meal. But Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife and daughter and crew of eight, were not there and nobody ever figured out what had happened to them.

And it's the birthday of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague, 1875, on this date. A great romantic figure who wandered Europe, sickly and sensitive young man in search of truth and in search of love.

He was a secretary to the sculptor, Rodin, for a time, and died in Switzerland after he'd picked a rose for a beautiful woman. The rose pricked his finger, a fatal infection set in, and he died in 1926.

Here's a poem for today by Timothy Steele, adopting a line from Alexander Barclay, an English poet of the 16th century. The line "Winter is near and the world is too hard." Poem is entitled "Sunday Afternoon."

"Winter is near and the world is too hard, and the phone, one might add, is disconnected. In the tame isolation of my yard, I rake the last leaves. To be respected and loved made sense to me once.

But of late, I'm drawn by more workable conceits. And the stiff rooftop antics of a kite and the leisure of broad, deserted streets seemed to outweigh the needs of sentiment.

The clouds shift, the light alters, and I pass serenely through the afternoon, intent on nothing but the leaves and the dead grass. So calm, so settled.

Such peace is the best. And sheltered in the remnants of the day, I gather what I want and leave the rest to the vague sounds of traffic far away."

A poem by Timothy Steele, "Sunday Afternoon," from his collection, Uncertainties and Rest, published by Louisiana State University Press and used by permission here on the Writer's Almanac for Monday, December the 4th. Made possible by Coles Magazines, publishers of American History and other magazines. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, thanks for joining us on Midmorning today. Stay tuned. Midday is coming up next. Tomorrow on Midmorning, we're going to talk about responsible shopping. There's been a lot of attention paid recently to the amount of child labor and sweatshop labor in the world that's making products that we all buy every day. We'll find out what you, as a consumer, can do about that. And we're also going to talk to a researcher from the National Geographic Society about natural disasters. That's coming up tomorrow on Midmorning at 9:00 AM.

ANDREI CODRESCU: I'm Andrei Codrescu. Join me, John Raby and the Washington crew for the news and long looks into the human soul. It's all things considered every day at 3:00 on the FM news station, KNOW-FM 91.1.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. It's 23 degrees under cloudy skies at the FM news station, KNOW-FM 91.1. Minneapolis, Saint Paul. It's going to become windy this afternoon in the Twin Cities. Look for winds at 20 to 30 miles per hour with a chance of rain, mixed with snow and sleet. A high temperature around 33.

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GARY EICHTEN: Good morning. It's 11:00, and this is Midday on the FM news station. I'm Gary Eichten.

In the news this morning, some 2,600 NATO troops are on their way to Bosnia to prepare for the arrival of the full 60,000-troop NATO peacekeeping force. Troops are arriving at a time when Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo continue their protests against the Dayton Peace Agreement the NATO troops are supposed to enforce.

Winnipeg Jets National Hockey League owner, Richard Burke, may announce today whether he'll move his team to Saint Paul, Phoenix or some other city. A Justice Department study says, the nation's prison population is soaring. Minnesota, however, has one of the lowest rates of incarceration in the nation. And a citizen's task force says the Prairie Island nuclear waste should not be moved to another site in Goodhue County.

Those are some of the stories in the news today. Coming up over the noon hour, former Washington DC Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, who says the nation needs a new form of leadership, a more feminine form of leadership. That's coming up at 12 o'clock.