Tom Benner was a writer and political activist born in Ravenna, Ohio in 1944. He died in Gainesville Florida in June 2000. He attended Kent State University where he was heavily involved in student activism. He was off-campus doing his laundry on the day of the iconic May 4th shootings. He always said that it was typical of his life that on its most exciting day, he was somewhere else. He participated in the Great Peace March in the late 80s, and when the march was over he settled in Gainesville. He said “I love the feistiness and complexity of Florida culture (Earth Day one weekend, Nazis the next.)”
Tom spent most of his life working on a long and complex novel series — a generation novel of a family of socialists deeply involved in all of the decades of political turmoil aided by their relationships with the Gods. Tom always wanted to sell his writing as political non-fiction. In the year leading up to the 15th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, he submitted his memories of the day to all of the leading progressive magazines. His query letter described it as the inside memories of a student leader in the protests, and he received numerous positive responses. When they read the article, full of what Thor had thought of the protests and how Athena advised them to handle events, those positive responses turned into no’s. Tom didn’t want to sell it as fiction and he didn’t want to write it without the gods. He insisted that publication in a pagan magazine wouldn’t mean as much to him as a political magazine. Like being at the laundromat the day his protests went into history, his writing often missed the obvious connections.
I met Tom in the 80s when we were in the same writing group in Ohio. I didn’t take to him at first. His conversations were prone to non-sequiters and he seemed to delight in doing everything the hard way. He perpetually fell in love with straight men and ignored suitable gay men who might have returned his feelings. He would refuse to standardize spelling or grammar in his writing because he was layering so many meanings on the words — “Don’t you see that it’s a pun in Latin?” I was taken aback when he declared me an incarnation of the goddess and his new muse.
It was when we corresponded during the Peace March that I began to appreciate him. His letters were filled with wit and kindness. He was the first Pagan I had met, the first vegetarian, the first political activist, the first serious writer. As the years went on, I realized how much of my life he influenced. I call him my godfather for that reason. He was my spiritual parent in so many ways, and I wouldn’t be the person I am if I hadn’t known him. His love for me was unconditional. He had no expectations for me, he wanted nothing from me, he only wanted me to be me.
Tom deliberately avoided any career success outside of writing. He thought having a solid job would hurt his ambition and he did not want to pay taxes to a government he didn’t support. He had a stroke in the mid 90s, and spent the rest of his life in a nursing home. He told me he saw it as a blessing because he could write all the time without worrying about food or shelter, but it seemed to me that a spark went out of him after that. He never finished any of the novels, although he worked on the ever growing novel cycle endlessly.
When he died, his writings were supposed to be sent to me as his literary executor. The box never arrived. I’ve got some snippets of things, letters, poems, one story we collaborated on. I have this hope that somehow, the box still exists somewhere and I’ll be able to find it some day. It hurts too much to think that everything he worked on is gone and his characters and stories are all in the trash. I know it must happen every day, people on the outskirts with that kind of crazy brilliance, people who can’t get taken seriously (or won’t, as I often thought Tom deliberately pushed any hope of success away) and their work gets thrown away because it’s just a bunch of paper from that crazy guy.
This web page is intended to keep the promise I made to him the take care of his writing after he died. I can’t publish what’s gone, but I can share what I have of his.
