It’s hard for Rick Lupert, whose latest collection, The Gettysburg Undress published by Rothco Press on September 15, 2014, to remember a time when he wasn’t writing. He wrote his first piece in the third grade (“a three-line acrostic poem about pigs,” he remembers) and, since then, has written 15 books of what he describes as “observational poetry.”
Like his previous books, The Gettysburg Undress was written on location and is part travelogue, part situational comedy, and part rom-com with his wife and travel companion, Addie, who Rick characterizes as “my muse.” Travel, Rick says, lends itself to his particular style of poetry, because when you arrive in a new town, “You’re experiencing something for the first time, and your eyes are wide open.”
The trip in The Gettysburg Undress takes them from Allentown, Pennsylvania, where all their travels begin, to the Crayola crayon factory, the battlefields and tourist traps of Gettysburg, the July 4th fireworks in Washington, DC, and Baltimore, Maryland, where the dark spirit of Edgar Allen Poe is undercut by the chipper mood of a clerk at the museum honoring his life.
Rick lives in Southern California with Addie, their son, three cats, and a frog. When not traveling or writing, he works as a song leader in Los Angeles synagogues.
